Once Upon
by Iellix
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a man called Hatter. Once upon a time, he had a story to tell--the secret origin of David Hatter.
1. Chapter 1

I don't need another fandom right now, but I seem to have found one anyway. I didn't expect to love "Alice" as much as I ended up loving it—and my shipper heart squee's at the Hatter/Alice romance. (Well, why not?) Hatter was my favourite character and we never hear anything about his past, so I felt like writing it.

This story is meant to sound like a narrative; Hatter is telling the story in the third person, but every so often he'll come in with an opinion or observation about the story so in a few places it switches into first person. I do hope it's not too painfully confusing!

Disclaimer: I don't own the character of Hatter, or Wonderland, or anything else you could recognize. It's either been written by Lewis Carroll or Nick Willing.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time there was a little boy named David.

In the memory he's a little boy, but I don't know how old. Maybe five, six years—little, young. Young enough, in any case, to be innocent and wide-eyed, irritatingly perky. Trusting. Stupid.

He has a mother and a father. He lives somewhere in Yorkshire but I don't remember where now. I don't know if he knew then, either. There are villages and cobbled streets, and farms, and lots and lots of sheep.

David's father is an American and he travels all the time. He's away from home a lot—weeks and months at a time—and when he's home it's never for a long time. But he bounces his son on his knee and brings him little toys and sweets and fantastic postcards from the places he's visited, with names that always sound so deliciously foreign and strange to him—Calgary, Miami, Columbia, Melbourne. His favourite one is from a place with a mundane-sounding name: New York. It was all huge towering buildings, lights, people everywhere. It's so different from everything he's ever known—small villages and sheep—that he can't help but fall in love with it the first time he sees the picture on the postcard and I'm not sure he ever fell completely _out_ of love with it.

His mother is kind and she smiles a lot. But she doesn't do anything with the other ladies in the village and keeps to herself. David finds her a lot in the big windowsill with a book in her lap, just staring and staring and staring out the window like she's off in another world and has left her body behind. Perhaps she's absentminded. Perhaps she had something on her mind. He never finds out. The time never seems right to ask. But she spends a lot of time there. Sometimes she's there in the morning when he wakes up and she stays there until after he's gone to bed for the night.

So David learns from a very young age how to fend for himself. He wakes himself up and he feeds himself. He lets the seams out of his trousers when he grows out of them. He scrapes together the money to pay the milkman and buys bread and sausage because if he didn't there would never be any food in the house when his father wasn't around, which is to say most of the time.

He goes to school for a time. A few years. I'm not sure his mother ever noticed he was in school; she didn't notice if he was there or not, if he wandered off, if he went somewhere else for the day. Sometimes I wonder how David survived being an infant when he was dependent on her. It's possible she wasn't always that way. Maybe she was a good mother when he was a little sprog. Evidently _someone_ was around to nurse him and burp him and change his nappies when they reeked. Maybe a nice old lady-neighbour or something came in a few times a day to make sure she hadn't killed the baby.

After a few years he stops going to school. He doesn't enjoy going because the teachers aren't terribly nice and crack his knuckles with a ruler when he falls asleep and crack his backside with a cane whenever he talks out of turn or asks too many questions or does something else that they find objectionable. He's found that means most of his behaviour. Children are to be seen and not heard, even in school where there are only other children. His mother doesn't notice he's not going to school anymore because she's too preoccupied most of the time with staring out the window. Whenever she _is_ lucid enough to notice he exists, he lies quickly and comes up with a fictional teacher and lessons, knowing full well she won't be talking to anybody who might contradict his story.

Instead he spends his days in the public library. Even though he has a distaste for school, he's never found learning to be unlikeable. He'd much rather be in the library amongst all of those ancient books, reading what he wants whenever he wants without worrying about someone else's schedule. He absorbs it all, day in and day out. He's already learned his letters, after all—now all that's left is to learn the words that can be made with them. All of them.

David loves words. He learns to work in them the way artists work with paints or marble. He loves to talk. He loves to see what he can do—what he can get _other people_ to do—with his words. Even at a young age, the knowledge that there is amazing power in language doesn't escape him. The full potential of that power does. It will be a long time before he knows.

The only thing he worries about is that his father might find out that he's not going to school anymore. His father is a businessman who takes education seriously and he wouldn't be happy if he found out that his son wasn't going to school anymore.

Fortunately, he always wires them a telegram a week or two before he's ready to come back to Yorkshire. In that time David can scrape together some spellers and books and papers with appropriate-looking lessons in them and spins stories for his father about how school is going. The stories always have to be far more detailed and well thought out for him, much more than those he spins for his mother. And through the power of words and the art of talking, his father always believes him. He finds it astonishing.

Are all adults this easy to fool? He doesn't know.

Even despite this, David is happy. His father sends them money, and while they certainly aren't wealthy by any means, David needs for nothing. Childhood is idyllic. He learns all he needs and is entertained all he wants with his words, his library. He has food. He has a bed. He has clothing. It isn't normal—and he knows it isn't normal—but it isn't bad, either.

And then one day his father is gone. He disappears. He went to New York for some business and he never came back. He ran away, or was killed, or something. In any case, he's gone and never seen or heard from again. For a long time he wonders what he did that made his father leave, what's wrong with him, thinks it could be his fault. But there is little time to think.

David and his mother are on their own and it's not long before even _she_ in her permanent state of absentmindedness realizes that there's no way they can survive if they do nothing.

So they go to work. Both of them. She finds a job in a milliner's shop, sewing little baubles and buttons on ladies hats, which works for her because it isn't too mentally taxing and she can still live in her own little world while she does it. He becomes a common newsboy. He stands on an old milk crate on a corner—because he's a short little thing and it's hard for adults to notice him in a crowd—and shouts for people to buy his papers.

He couldn't be going to school now if he wanted to—there is no time for that. There is no time for books or for learning because in order to keep the rent paid and food on the table, they must both work.

Once upon a time there was a little boy named David, whose life changed for the first of many times when he was just a child.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

I hope you enjoyed this first chapter. I never write in present-tense and this felt a little weird to write—I hope it flows all right! I have a funny way of writing stories myself; by the time I post a story, it's either complete or mostly complete, and I post once or twice a week until all the chapters are posted. It sounds funny, but it keeps there from being wildly variant times between updates. (And it gives me time to finish!)

Feedback is always appreciated, but never demanded. Updates will come regardless.


	2. Chapter 2

Hello again! Thanks for reading the first chapter—this second one is just as short, I'm afraid, but after this they get a bit longer. (For me, a 'short' chapter is less than 1500 words. I'm known to make chapters 10,000 words long. I am not proud of this.) This story, as I said, is about Hatter's past. It will, eventually, overlap with the events of the series but that's some time later.

Disclaimer: Hatter isn't my property. He and this rendition of 'Alice in Wonderland' are property of Nick Willing and the SyFy channel. (Why did they change the name to that? Seriously.)

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a young boy named David decided he had to help his mother.

His father is gone, but that bothers him less and less as time goes on. At first it's a shock because he's his _father,_ and he's _gone_ and there's no reason for it and no excuse but as time goes by David realizes that having no father isn't too different than when he had one. He was never around so he's never been used to seeing him, so his absence is just par for the course. In any case, he has much more to worry about.

His absentminded mother, whom he loves because she's his mother and he has to, thinks her job in a milliner's shop can support herself and her son, but David knows better. He is only ten years old and he knows that he has to start taking care of his mother because she cannot take care of _herself_ let alone both of them.

The money in the bank from his father is going to run out. They've long since left their house in the village and moved to where the living quarters are smaller and more cramped, but where they can both work. There is no library for David to get lost in and read in, no fantastical imaginative worlds to explore, and in any case there's no time for that now. Instead he stands day in and day out on a milk crate to peddle newspapers, which he reads every day because he _needs_ words the way people _need_ food and water. Now he learns more of the wider world around him, of the world outside of England—outside of _Yorkshire—_and it seems like the world itself is getting a little bit closer to him.

Some of the stories stay with him. The ones that stick with him are from 1914, and the only reason I still know the year is because of the headlines at the time, all of which read "WAR!" in big block black letters. The world is not only getting smaller, it's getting more dangerous too.

He learns to talk people into buying the papers he sells; other newsboys stand on stairs and crates shouting 'extra!' and summarizing the front-page article as the distributor always tells them to. Perhaps it's because he can read and almost without exception the other newsboys can't, but David is quick to learn that the more emotional and dramatic summarizations play on people, and they're far more likely to listen to—and purchase a paper from—him when he plays to the people.

Women like emotion. Men like adventure. He tailors his speech to the people passing him, to the time of day. And it works, it works.

Words are magic.

_His words_ are magic.

It's starting to occur to him—slowly, slowly—that words can be far more useful to him, that he can use them to his advantage. He is beginning to develop his gift.

Some time later, when the money is all but gone and things are starting to look desperate for them, that his mother decides to get married again. She thinks she's doing what's best for both of them by marrying again, because eventually she's noticed that she can't support her son and thinks a man will be able to do so.

His name is James.

He's gruff and spits a lot. He drinks and stinks and stumbles. He bellows at David and at his mother, and she lets him do it because she thinks that being married will somehow make things better. He would tell her that it doesn't make things better, that there has to, has to, has to be something else they can do, but distressingly his power to make anyone believe anything he tells them doesn't work on her. She doesn't live in the same world as everyone else. Maybe that's why. He doesn't know. I don't know, either, but it was a long, long time ago. It probably would never have made any difference anyway.

But his mother being married to James hardly betters their situation and the money still isn't there. His stepfather drinks most of it and the rest David has no access to. Even his own pennies from peddling papers aren't his anymore, because James takes them 'to use for the house' and he never sees them again. The only money he gets to keep is that which he finds on the ground or that he finds as extra in his coin pouch at the end of the day.

The first time he uses his power of language for his own monetary benefit, he is only eleven years old. It takes him weeks to convince himself that it'd be all right. He isn't stealing, he's going to convince people to _give him_ money. It's different. They're doing it of their own free will. He will not cut purses or pick pockets. It's different.

_Not stealing,_ he tells himself over and over again. _Not stealing._

So in the evening before James is back from the pub and while his mother is quietly working in the kitchen, trying to make a meal from the meagre food they have, David makes sure he's clean and dressed in his good clothes—he must be clean and presentable, his hair combed, to make this work, he knows, because appearance is everything—and he slips out. She won't notice he's missing and James won't care.

He's practiced his story over and over again. He knows what to say. He knows how to say it. And as he walks out into the crowded streets, he puts the story into play.

"Excuse me," he says to one person after another, making his eyes look as big as possible while making the rest of himself look as small as possible. The younger he looks, the more likely it is someone will believe him. "Excuse me, do you have a penny to spare? I need to telephone my mum…"

He asks women, and only women, because he knows that women are more likely to buy this story. Especially women with children in tow. He tells some of them that he's visiting a cousin and got lost, or that he wants to telephone his mother who went out of town, or that a boy at school took his money and he has no more for a bus. He asks for pennies only—no more—and because he's neither begging nor demanding most of the women look at him sympathetically and dig into their purses for coins. Some of them give him two pence; others ask if there's anything they can do to help. He always thanks them for their generosity and punctuates with 'god bless!' and skips off to a public telephone in order to sell the story.

He is nothing if not careful. He cons—it's a con, he knows it's a con—only two or three women on one street before zipping around to another, where he pulls the same con again, so nobody becomes suspicious. He's at it for hours, until his pockets begin to jingle suspiciously and he hides his money in his socks so he doesn't make any telltale noises.

He is surprised how well it works. By the end of the night he has seven shillings and three pence and a button that one woman gave to him in order to shut him up and that he didn't notice wasn't a penny until he emptied his socks out in a private nook. It takes him a little while and then a long while to realize the significance of this.

Words can do marvellous things.

He buys bread and sausage and bundles them up in an old towel and leaves the bundle outside the door when he gets home, knowing his mother will find the food. Let her think it was a charitable contribution from some good Samaritan. The rest of the money he hides away carefully in an old matchbox under a loose floorboard in the bathroom, where he knows it's nigh well impossible that James will find it.

A week or so later when the food and his money are running low, David tries the con again. He cleans up, combs his hair, looks small and helpless, and asks passerbys for pennies. Again, it works. This time he is not surprised.

A few weeks later he tries another con, a different one, in another part of town; he gets on his hands and knees near a gutter and cries that he's dropped the shilling his mother gave him to buy bread. This con works, too.

He learns to play people. He learns to talk, to sell stories, to make people—any people—believe any story he tells them.

During the day he sells newspapers. In the evenings he quietly convinces people to give him pennies so his mother can eat.

This becomes his life.

Once upon a time, a young boy named David discovered that words can be—_are—_magic.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Even though he's well on his way to being a conman, there's something to be said for a cute, adorable little kiddie!Hatter. In my head he's wearing short trousers and a newsboy cap and he's still got that one dimple thing going on. But that might just be me. I don't know if he starts off deliberately self-serving or not. In this case, he's learning how to con people because he has to. It would be a defining moment when he learned how to do it, too, I think.

Thanks for reading! This story, all fourteen chapters of it, is almost entirely written now so I'll be posting twice a week. I've arbitrarily picked Thursdays and Mondays for chapters, so look for updates on those days!


	3. Chapter 3

There seems to be an inadvertent and ridiculously long gap in my posting. I wish I could apologize for it, but something tells me it won't work out. I'm still sorry. I got sick, and then started re-writing this story, and then worked on other things for a while, and then completely forgot about updating. Yeah, I have no excuses. I'm really sorry! Here's another chapter. I hope you don't hate it. I'm gonna go hide under the sofa now.

Disclaimer: I don't own the character of Hatter; he is the property of the SyFy Network. (I hate that name. Really, I do. What's wrong with Sci-Fi?)

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a boy called David wanted to do more.

He never thinks of himself as greedy—he takes no more money from people than he needs and doesn't pull any of his cons while there is still money stashed away—but still, he feels like he should make up for what he does. There must be something he can do. Not for himself, but for people who can't get money the way he does. He knows he and his mother are hardly alone in their plight, and that saddens him. More, it makes him want to do more to help.

He starts small. He uses some of his pennies and shillings to buy bread for some of the other people living in the same row of tiny cramped apartments where he knows there are people struggling, with no food—widows with and without children, the sick, the crippled, little old ladies. He goes through his con-money faster this way, and he has to take the enormous risk of going out weekly—and sometimes more than once a week—to scramble for pennies. He almost thinks it's not worth it, until he notices the woman two doors over one day while she hangs out some washing. She has roses in her cheeks and she's smiling. Her children are smiling, too. They don't look listless. They aren't clutching their empty bellies. And with that David is sold. This is what he must do.

He needs to come up with more and more sophisticated cons, in order to secure the money. Begging from pennies from women to get on a bus or pay for a telephone call worked when it was just him buying bread for his mother, but now that he's buying more he needs more than just pennies. And crying that he can't find his mum to play on women's sympathies works less reliably these days, now that he's fourteen and his voice is squeaking and he's got spots on his face and fuzz on his chin.

So he changes, and adapts.

For a while he watches the panhandlers, the scammers, and internalizes their actions. Learns their craft. He never wanted to steal, but is scamming any different from stealing? He is convincing people to _give him_ their money rather than reaching into their pockets and taking it himself—is it that bad? David is always careful, he never scams from people he doesn't think can spare the coins and he never takes much from any one person.

But he is still a thief. He is still a conman. He's less concerned with doing the right thing than he is with not getting caught; he takes just small amounts from lots of different people not because he doesn't want to rob someone blind but because people are less likely to grow suspicious or angry when there's only spare change on the line.

But he lies and deludes himself until even he believes his own story, that he's doing it to be a good person because if he didn't he might have an attack of conscience and he doesn't want to have an attack of conscience because this way of living is far more interesting—and lucrative—than being honest.

There is an old woman who lives in a dilapidated room in a dilapidated house who he sees outside often, dutifully knitting. She is ancient and must be at least two hundred years old. Her hair, what's left of it, is thin and wispy and white-white; she is missing most of her teeth and one of her eyes, and she keeps a little square of lacy white linen tied over the hole where it once was. Her face is wrinkled as an old dried apple and her hands are gnarled like chicken's feet. But every time he sees her, she nods to him and says hello and soon they strike up an acquaintance.

"I see what you do," she says to him one day. "I'm impressed. You help those who can't help themselves. Most people with your gift help themselves and no one else, but not you. I like that."

She can teach him things, she says with that enormous toothless grin. At first David isn't completely sure what she means by this. Then she explains, that once she was married to a man who made his living much the same way. He ran scams, played on other people's greed, and he took the money and used it to buy food for them and their children because it was easier to do that than it was to find a job that wouldn't earn enough money to put food on the table.

Even though his motives are less than philanthropic, he knows better than to refuse because the more he learns the better he can hone his craft. He lets her think his goal is to feed the poor like a modern-day Robin Hood rather than a crafty little monster.

So she teaches him. She's old and ancient but her hands are quick with cards and cups and he learns. He goes out and plays on other people's greed—he stays away from the poor and desolate and instead goes for the pompous greedy rich, who think they can make quick money by winning the little fourteen-year-old boy's game.

He makes the act look reasonably easy to win. He grabs a few newsboys before they go in for their papers and he offers them a few shillings if they'll help him and they almost always agree, because anything is better than standing on a crate and barking all day. He cleans the boys up and combs their hair and tucks schoolbooks under their arms—they can't read and they always _tell him_ they can't read, but he tells them to play act, that it will help them sell the game, and they believe him.

His little actors 'happen upon the game on their way to school' and immediately double their money playing his game. Other people—greedy people—notice and shove the boys aside to have a go at the game themselves, and it's then that David changes the way the game is played so the mark always loses. Slight-of-hand. People are less likely to believe he's a conman because he's a boy and so they let their guard down in a way they wouldn't otherwise.

He is, as always, careful. He never takes more than a few pounds from any one person and he never plays the game in the same place in a week.

He learns more tricks from his elderly mentor. All the while she talks to him. Talks and talks. He's never known anyone talk so much as she does. Even _he_ doesn't talk quite that much—he's quiet when he's thinking, which is what he's always doing when he's not talking. Maybe she's lonely, he thinks, and is glad that he's around to talk to.

But he listens to her talk and her stories and for the first time in years he finds himself amused and happy. Words are important, even when they aren't his and aren't being used to make money.

When he asks her why it is she talks so much, she smiles at him with that enormous toothless smile and says simply, "I'm an old woman, little David. So long as I know I can still talk, I know my heart's still beating. So long as there are people listening, I know I'm still here."

And then one day when he is not quite fifteen, the old woman stops talking and her heart stops beating and she is, indeed, gone.

He takes what she taught him and he uses it. Every day he earns a little more money.

He always hides the money from his stepfather, because he knows James will take it from him, and he hides it from his mother, too, because he knows she'll tell James, and James will take his money. He can't afford to let that happen. He doesn't want to stop.

Time passes.

He becomes better with words. He becomes more sophisticated. He's long learned that if he cleans up and wears nice clothes and a hat, that he can get away with a great deal. He ingratiates himself to people of status and wealth, who he never feels too badly about stealing or conning from with stories and schemes—they are, after all, pampered and living on the backs of those beneath them without caring what happens to them.

He talks his way into fancy parties held by people with more money than sense and slips away with food, and silk napkins, and bits of silver, and dropped earrings, and little things that he can sell. He's begun to use a little more of the proceeds on himself, frequenting tea-rooms and enjoying the finer things in life, and buying the odd coat or shirt, because he tells himself that appearance is half of his game. He must _look_ the part in order to sell his story.

But eventually, perhaps inevitably, James notices that something is up. He notices there's always food in the house and his stepson is dressing well and he's not short any money, and he grows suspicious. He yells at David, accuses him of stealing, and when his mother steps in to intervene and defend him, he yells at her.

The fights escalate. His mother isn't living in her own little world anymore. It hardly looks like she's living at all. Her face is blank, her eyes are dull, and she looks as if she's been turned off to the whole world. He finds he misses the times when she would sit in the windowsill in their old house and stare out the window, because at least—wherever her mind took her—she was happy because she always smiled. She doesn't smile anymore.

But he can't stop the fighting. Sometimes he thinks he might have made a bad choice in doing what he does, but why is feeding his family a bad choice? He rationalizes his actions. If this hadn't set James off, then no doubt something else would have done later.

While David watches, the fighting escalates. James yells at and argues with his mother until the woman cries, and day after day he feels the anger boil higher and higher in his stomach like a frothing pot on a stove. With every bellowed syllable, with every accusation, he hates James a little more and a little more.

He can't stand it, begs his mother not to let him do that to her. She has never cared much for him, living in her own fantasy world, nor he for her, but she's still his mother. She isn't terribly lucid, but she means well. She isn't deliberately malevolent. She just never knew how to be a mother. But she won't leave James and she lets him do whatever he wants.

"He's my husband, I have to respect him," she tells him, clearly overlooking the fact that he never gives a modicum of respect for _her_ in return. "He provides for us." But James doesn't provide and he never has. It's _him,_ just as it always has been. He has always taken care of his mother. He can do it again. He can do it _without_ his stepfather.

But as always, his mother doesn't listen to his words and he cannot talk her into doing what he wants, what he knows is best. She's trying but she doesn't know how.

It isn't long after that when he sees James hit her for the first time, and somewhere inside the deep recesses of his head, a little white-hot flame explodes.

His mother is standing there in stunned shock when her drunken husband swings at her, catches her face, turning her whole cheek red from the impact. And David, sixteen and short and skinny, instinctively fights for his mother. He comes up next to James and whistles so he'll turn to him, and he uses that brief second of unawares to deck him.

He's amazed that the man falls to the floor. He's standing over his stepfather with a look of awe on his face, looking from the man on the floor to his still-clenched right fist and back again. His knuckles hurt and he feels like he's possibly broken something, but the pain is nothing compared to the feelings of _power_ and _strength_ that he feels. For the first time, he thinks he might not be helpless. Words will not always work, but now he doesn't have to rely solely on words.

James isn't prepared to let the brat get away with it, so he tries to beat the tar out of him. But David is quicker on his feet and his reflexes haven't been dulled by too many years of drink, so he ducks and dodges every punch and lams into his aggressor with that surprisingly powerful right arm. He doesn't know how or why it works, but it does, and he's not going to complain.

He tries one or two more times but it soon becomes apparent that the younger and faster one will prevail in every fight and he stops trying all together.

For a short, brief, halcyon time everything seems all right. James still drinks and stinks but he doesn't yell or hit. He's afraid of David.

But it doesn't last.

His mother comes down with a fever and is sick for a long, long time. The fever doesn't break and no doctor he brings to the house can help. She dies with as little fuss as when she lived. He likes to think she's gone to live forever in the private little made-up world she always lived in. Or maybe she's in Heaven. Or maybe she's just stopped all together and there is no Heaven at all.

Wherever she is now, she's not suffering anymore.

The body isn't even cold when David makes his decision. He has a bag of clothes and all of his money with him at the funeral. He takes everything that belongs to his mother and sells it before James can do the same, and he takes the money to start over somewhere else. The only thing that tied him here was his mother, and now that she is gone there's nothing for him here.

His next destination is unknown, but he starts at the most logical place: the train station. It would be easy enough for him to wait until it slows and leap into an empty boxcar, but that isn't his style. Instead he talks his way into the first class car. It's a comfortable ride on a velvet seat, and he looks away from the window so he doesn't see it as Yorkshire vanishes into the distance behind him.

He will carry on, live elsewhere, and keep talking. He will always keep talking. So long as he keeps doing that, he'll know he's still alive.

Once upon a time, a boy named David had to stop being a boy forever.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Poor little Hatter. In my head he turns out the way he does because he's had to—he's not bad guy, just a little misguided. A survival technique. After all, people are the sum of their experiences—and since our experiences don't just _stop,_ we're always changing.

That's as philosophical as I get. I hope you enjoyed the chapter. Sorry again about the huge gap. I'll try my damndest to be more careful now. Until next time—same Bat-time, same Bat-station!


	4. Chapter 4

So, Thursdays are kind of crazy days for me so I think I might switch to Fridays instead. I don't have so much stuff dividing my attention on Friday mornings as I do on Thursdays. Anyway, sorry about missing this morning. I kinda got distracted. Bad, bad writer!

In this chapter, Hatter stops going by David and starts going by Hatter. Everyone has their stories about why Hatter picks the name 'David' when he goes back through the Looking Glass, but in my head that was his name before—you know, once upon a time.

Disclaimer: I don't own it and am not profiting from it!

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a young man named David came into the nickname 'The Hat-Man'.

He is known to be generous. Whenever the hat comes around, he contributes. Even if it's just a few shillings, it's something. And _something_ is better than _nothing_. Sometimes he passes the hat himself, his own hat—a worn tan thing that he plays with all the time when he needs to keep his hands busy.

Despite what the rich think, nobody _wants_ to be poor. It's not something people _aspire_ to, it isn't easy, it's no one's _fault_ for being that way, and nobody likes it. But once people have been knocked that low it's nearly impossible for them to pick themselves up. David knows this all too well so he does what he can to help people who need it.

This has been his life, for a long time. Since he was a boy. He is a long way from Yorkshire and from his life as a newsboy and as a kind of modern-day Robin Hood. He lives in lots of different places now, mostly dealing with the shady underworld but never truly accepting a place amongst them. He stays on the fringes. He works as a freelance conman. He earns his keep. He drops money into the hat. He never says no to any request to lend money, and he's certain that some people are trying to take advantage of him but he can always tell the people who are sincere and those who aren't.

He's good at people. He can decipher their personalities and their heads in a very short time, which is useful to him because he tailors his cons and his acts to fit people; everyone is mostly different, so no two schemes can or _should_ be alike.

And he is always _just_ on the edge of the seedy folk, one foot in lawfulness and the other in his cons. He is never fully on one side or the other. He's not sure he wants to be one or the other. Why limit himself? The trick is to find balance. Good and bad. Darkness and light. It is impossible to be all one, or all the other. There has to be balance.

He's so good at what he does that he fools everyone. He plays both sides of the law. He tells the other conmen when they need to lay low a while because the police are starting to get suspicious, and at the same time he tells the police when he finds someone running a con he finds particularly objectionable—cheating elderly people of their life-savings, running brothels—because there has to be _some_ honour amongst thieves.

He's careful, here, too. He drops breadcrumbs for both sides without letting on that he does, indeed, play both sides. They all think they have a man cleverly on the inside, and he's so good with words and so good with people that he keeps the charade effortlessly.

And he always passes the hat.

Just because they are lawbreakers doesn't mean they don't deserve help.

Eventually the name 'Hat-Man' simply becomes 'Hatter' and in time he adopts the name himself. He likes it. It sounds just the littlest bit edgy, and less boyish than the name 'David', which he thinks he's outgrown and ties him to a little village in Yorkshire. Hatter is a man's name. A conman's name.

His life falls into a routine. For years he does the same things—he orchestrates cons, he talks his way into society so he can siphon money from them. He has a soft spot for all of the widows and children of the men who die in trenches. They are alone in the world with no means of their own and he remembers what that's like and he doesn't want any other families to end up with other Jameses, so he does his best to help them at great risk to himself. At any time they could tell someone that the mysterious Hatter is giving them money and it wouldn't take long for people to put the pieces together, but they keep it hush-hush like he asks them to.

He helps them, one at a time. Because he knows everybody and can talk to everybody, he manages to find them reliable income—an honest living, as a maid or housekeeper or teacher or seamstress; he talks to he men in 'society' who are often fat retired colonels and who are usually quite willing to help if he tells them that a woman's husband has died fighting their 'Great War'. This way the women aren't having to sink to prostitution or worse, or having to send their children out to work when they should still be children. He makes sure they have food until they're settled.

So lots of people owe him favours. Lots of people on _both_ sides, because he's generous and pretends to be a philanthropist and for a while he tells himself that that's the reason he's doing it—because it's the right thing to do—but eventually he comes clean to himself and admits that he does it because the more people who owe him favours, the better.

Because of what he does he plays a dangerous game and he cashes in small favours all the time. Often he uses it to secure an alibi when the police get too nosy, and other times he wants an in to a party where he knows he can find a few stupid marks that he can systematically liberate of their money and belongings.

He lives well. Playing the part of society in order to weasel his way into their world, he's gotten a taste of their world and he's discovered that part of him rather likes the high living. Good food, good drink, velvet coats. There are certain perks that come from sitting pretty in the middle between society and the underworld—as precarious as the position is, it's thrilling. He gets a taste of the best of each world. Since both sides think he's their spy they both treat him well.

He thinks this is all he needs—the good life in both worlds and a never-exhausting supply of people to con.

And then…

For some time he notices a young woman on the street every day. She looks about his age, eighteen or so, maybe a little older. She wears old worn clothing and begs for money in a tin cup. She is blind—her eyes long gone milky-pale and staring that disconcerting blank blind stare ahead, unable to focus on anything—and heartbreakingly pretty with her round pink cheeks and yellow-blonde hair. She's all alone and naturally Hatter feels for her. Every day he sees her he puts a few shillings in her cup because people often pass her by without so much as looking at her. Others stand near her and talk about her openly, since because she's blind she must also be deaf or stupid or both and thus unaware that they exist. She never tells them to stop, though, and never seems to notice them. She's probably had her whole life to learn how to ignore people like that. But it still sticks pins into him. He's never liked to see the helpless being victimized. It rubs him the wrong way. I suppose it still does.

So every day he makes a point to give her a few shillings and say hello and talk with her. She always gives him a radiant smile and thanks him. Her smile is broad and dimpled, and she has a funny habit of taking her lower lip in her teeth that makes him turn to jelly inside.

Hatter always asks her if there's anything she needs, but pride must keep her from admitting she needs help because she always says she's fine and doesn't need anything.

The woman's name is Grace. He learns a little more about her each day, each week. After so long doing the same things, she is a break in the routine. He enjoys talking to her. She is quick-witted and clever and laughs at her own jokes and seems generally untroubled by her situation or by the people who make nasty comments within earshot. For someone to be so good-natured in face of such adversity is a trait he's never managed to grasp himself and he finds it refreshing, even though he finds her pride and her stubbornness a frustration.

She will take nothing from him—not a shawl to keep out the cold nor a loaf of bread nor offer of help—except for the few shillings he gives her a day. No matter what he says or how he says it, no matter how he tries to charm her, she's still adamant and holds firm and there's nothing she'll do if it isn't already her idea and there's nothing he can strategically talk her into doing.

But she's such enjoyable company that he finds he doesn't mind at all. As long as she's there every day and he can check up on her, he'll know she's still all right. It isn't much, but he can keep an eye on her, at least.

Because she's blind, she becomes the natural target for thugs. Little bratty boys who think they have more balls than they do, who think picking on a blind woman is good fun; the people who despise the poor for being poor and especially the _blind_ and poor because it's just one more vice to hate. Sometimes he sees people trying to reach into her cup and dip into the coins she begs and sometimes they do get away with some of them. Grace fights them as best she can but in the end she is usually outnumbered and nobody would think to help a poor, blind beggar.

Hatter shoos them away, scares them off, is prepared to fight them—when he sees them. Mostly he hears about it afterwards, when it's too late for him to do anything.

"Never you worry," she tells him reassuringly, even though she must be able to hear the low growl in his voice and the heaving of his angry breaths when she tells him. "I'm fine, see? Not harmed. I'm always fine. I promise."

It fails to reassure him, and when he sees hulking gorilla of a boy with a toothpick in his teeth trying to rough her up and take her money while everyone else in the area conveniently looks away or pretends not to notice, impulse kicks in. His right hand clenches and he charges. The boy is flattened and stumbles off and Hatter presents Grace with the money she lost to him and asks if she's hurt.

She tells him she's not, and has an inexplicable smile on her face.

"I'm not helpless," she reminds him. She is forever reminding him, and he believes she's not helpless, but that didn't mean she didn't need help so he worries for her twice as much because she doesn't worry for herself.

This day he decides to stay at her side. She _will not_ let him buy her food or anything else so the least he can do is keep her company and make sure she's safe.

And then suddenly she stands up. He reaches up to put a hand on her elbow to steady her but she shakes him off.

"Come with me," she says. It isn't a request or a question but a demand and he obediently follows.

When Grace walks she is so sure of herself. She doesn't stumble or tap the ground with a cane, she doesn't bump into anyone or anything. He has to stop and look and see if she is indeed blind or if she's been fooling him this whole time, but her eyes are still blank and unfocused. She keeps one hand on the row of buildings which she is apparently using to get her bearings.

"Where are we going?" He asks.

"You'll see."

And he asks no more questions and walks with her.

There is a row of tiny little buildings and apartments—still cramped, but presentable at least, in the nicer part of town. He wonders what they're doing there and is surprised when Grace produces a key and lets herself into one of them.

"You live here?"

She turns back and faces approximately where she thinks he's standing—she's off by about six inches—and smiles. Then she lets him in.

The room is simple but comfortable. There are no lights anywhere and no paintings on the walls—she needs none of that, after all—but there is a bed and a comfy couch and a phonograph with records tucked away next to it. He's slowly processing everything around him as Grace empties a purse she's kept hidden in her corset somewhere. There's money in it, lots of money, more than he remembered seeing with her. Then it dawns on him.

"You're a thief."

She looks extremely proud of herself and she smiles again and the corners of her eyes crinkle and Hatter feels his guts do funny flips and his head go all fuzzy.

"Are you—_what_ are you?" He asks.

"Something like that," she explains. "I only take from the people who think they can steal from me, or pick on me."

"You're really…" and then he trails off because he's not sure if he should finish the question but she knows what he's asking and she nods.

"Oh, I'm blind all right. It's not an act. But I'm not helpless, either."

Now he understands why she's never taken anything from him before. Not because she's too proud to take it but because she simply doesn't need it. She takes care of herself and she fools everybody into thinking she cannot—including him.

"This is the hand life has dealt me," she explains. "It's a lousy one, but I can make it work. There's no way in the world I can make my living doing any sort of work, because who would want a blind woman working for them? They think I'm helpless and useless, always have. So I take what they think of me and I use it for my benefit. If they think they can steal the pennies from my cup, that's fine, but when they are close enough to reach my cup I'm close enough to reach their purse. And who would suspect the harmless blind beggar?"

She laughs.

Hatter melts.

And with that he is completely smitten.

Once upon a time a young man who called himself Hatter fell in love for the first time.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Hatter tells Alice, "After much chocolate and cream cake, 'like' becomes 'what was his name again?'", so obviously he knows a little something about what that feels like. He must do. I think maybe before Hatter turned into a dreadful user and player, he could've been a decent guy. He's got too much good in him for him to have never been a good fellow. Also, Hatter-in-love is cute, admit it.

Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed—feedback is, as always, muchly appreciated, but never demanded.


	5. Chapter 5

I don't want to set anyone up for anything here, but I nearly cried writing this chapter. That doesn't happen to me often, so I hope that says something. It also gives a little bit of bearing on when the story takes place. I know this story doesn't have a whole lot in the way of an established time-frame in it (other than that David 'Hatter' is a newsboy when the First World War breaks out), so this is another chapter in which I mention a specific year. Knowing the year isn't really required to understand the events of this story, but some people need some kind of real-world time reference.

Disclaimer: Hatter is not my property. Neither is Wonderland. Wonderland turns up in this story eventually, I swear.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a man called Hatter was happy.

He lives a decent life straddling both sides of the law and enjoying the finer things in life. He is neither lawless nor fully lawful. He has found his balance. He is still a conman and he knows he is still a conman but at twenty-one years old it hasn't bothered him in a long, long time. He never cuts purses and he never robs—he only makes people's greed work for him.

He takes a cut of what he makes.

He has a decent life.

And he has Grace.

Hatter and Grace have become a team. She is just as wily and clever as he is and they both know how to play people; they manipulate the world, which has dealt them both a less than kind hand, so that their little corner of it works in their favour. Nobody suspects the helpless blind woman and nobody suspects the charming and handsome young man.

More than just being a team, they are lovers, too. He more or less lives in her rented room with her, and he brings her records for her phonograph and books that he reads for her. Her favourites are always the stories, the wonder tales aimed at children—_Treasure Island_ and _Peter Pan_ and _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland,_ a story he knows mostly by heart now because it was one of the books he read at least ten thousand times as a child. She loves the stories and the words almost as much as he does but she cannot read them herself. He's offered to teach her—he's found books for the blind, with raised letters and little bumps and he knows she's smart enough to learn—but she waves off the suggestion with a flippant hand and declines every time.

"An old dog like me is a little too old to learn new tricks," she tells him, even though she is just four years older than he is. "And anyway, if I could read myself then I wouldn't get to hear your voice."

She has long told him that she loves his voice, finds it attractive in a way that other women are attracted to eyes and smiles. She's blind so she can't see him and has no idea what he looks like—and Hatter knows he's quite handsome—and was born blind so she can't even paint a picture of him in her head with the memory of sight; she likes the sound of his voice but his words never work on her the way they work on other people, and the words slide right off of her like water off a duck. She is charmed by his words, but rarely convinced to do what he wants.

But she loves him anyway and the two of them are stupidly happy together.

And so this, too, becomes his life.

He is content and he is happy.

But as always, the halcyon days do not last.

That is what always happens to everybody in the world eventually—whatever good fortune comes, it is just as easily taken away. The _Rotunda Fortuna,_ he remembers from the books he's always been so very fond of. The Wheel of Fortune. The wheel always turns, luck always changes; no matter how bad things get, eventually they will get better; and nothing in the world is so good and wonderful that it will last forever. One must endure the bad times knowing the good will come sooner or later and savour the good times because eventually the good times, too, end, and the wheel turns and life goes on.

Life has already gone on for most of the world and the wheel is turning. The war is over, and has been, and the world is putting itself back together again. The widows of the trench-fighters that he's spent so long helping have benefitted enough from his help that they don't need his help so desperately anymore and people elsewhere in Europe are skulking off in shame of having drawn the short straw at the end of the war.

So it seems inevitable that Hatter's wheel must also turn. Things have been too good for too long but he has been enjoying life too much to notice that his time has come.

It begins innocuously enough when Grace is coughing and tired and slows down and needs to sleep a lot. She waves off his concern as she always does—he's never known anyone so unconcerned with their own well-being as Grace is—and tells him it's nothing, she is fine. Hatter doesn't believe her and he worries more and more for her.

She wakes up at night and wakes _him_ up at night with an angry barking cough so violent it shakes the bed and racks her whole little body. She coughs so hard she can't breathe and she gasps helplessly for breath like a fish flung out of water and when she _does_ breathe they're always shallow breaths that rasp and rattle and finally Hatter decides that he won't put up with her flippant attitude anymore and he demands she sees a doctor. He expects to have to fight with her to get her to do what he wants but rather uncharacteristically, she meekly agrees.

When the doctor comes to see her, Hatter waits outside the door pacing back and forth so much he worries he might wear a hole through the floor and fall through to the cellar below him. Pace, pace, pace. He turns his hat in his hands nervously and waits to hear the news.

And then the doctor emerges from the room and he looks grave and his eyes are sad, which is a look Hatter decides is absolutely _not comforting_ to see on a medical man because the last time he saw a similar look he was told his mother would die. The doctor says one word and the word just hangs in the air, a physical presence, a malevolence.

Tuberculosis.

The word is a death sentence and he knows it. Grace knows it too. The doctor has already told her when Hatter kneels by her bedside. He wants to cry but he doesn't and Grace is just smiling a shaky smile and strokes his hair and tells him not to worry. She always tells him not to worry. Only Hatter can't _not worry_ about her because if he didn't worry for her then nobody in the world would.

Then the landlord finds out about her illness and immediately kicks both of them out. The disease spreads and he doesn't want his building becoming infected, and it's nearly impossible for them to find another place to stay because now Grace is coughing all the time and her skin has gone ghostly grey and everyone in the world knows what that means. For a while Hatter tries to take care of her on his own, but with no roof over their heads and no place to stay it's hard to do. No money and no amount of talking, no owed favours or playing in the world will convince someone to let a woman with consumption rent from them. Eventually it becomes clear there's nowhere else for her to go except for the fever house, where she can be quarantined so the tuberculosis doesn't spread.

The day he brings her there is one of the hardest days of his life. Grace has sold most of her possessions—all but two dresses and a few personal items; even her beloved phonograph has to go, so she can afford to pay for the care she needs because she won't let Hatter contribute, which makes him want to pull his hair out in frustration and kiss her at the same time because Grace will never ever change.

They keep her quarantined. No one but for the doctors and nurses are allowed to see her and every day he misses her more. He can't even continue on with his cons and talking his way into parties because his head is miles away in the fever house with Grace so he has to stop, because a badly-played con will get him caught or worse.

Finally one night he breaks into the fever house—he knows which room is hers because he's allowed to send her letters—and he sneaks in through her window. She is pleased he's there but so exhausted that she can hardly sit up. Some people recover from consumption and for a time he held out hope that maybe, maybe Grace would be one of them, but looking at her now so frail and thin and gaunt, he knows it's not going to happen that way.

Even so, she smiles at him and laughs softly, but the laughter just makes her cough and cough, that barking cough, and it breaks his heart. He sits in the bed with her and holds her while she shakes and trembles because coughing takes up most of what little strength she has left. He doesn't care that just sitting here could make him catch it, too, because he just wants to be close to her.

He comes to her whenever he can at night, when he won't be noticed because all of the patients are supposed to be in bed and no visitors are allowed. She is, as always, glad he's come to see her, and always tells him that she's fine even though she knows—and knows that _he_ knows—that everything is just the opposite of fine. Every time he comes, she's weaker and every time he comes he knows the end is nearer.

But he still sits with her in the hospital bed and holds her because she's shivering and cold even though her body is burning up with fever. It's all he can do. All he has left for her.

She coughs into a little white handkerchief and tries to hide it from him but he sees the little spray of blood where she covered her mouth.

"It's nothing," she mouths, but the only sound that comes out is a little croak because her throat and chest are so raw she can barely even talk.

She wriggles down and he helps her lay flat on the pillows. She closes her eyes.

"I'm just going to rest," she says, her voice barely a whisper. "But keep talking."

"Grace…"

"It's nothing," she says again. "Go on, talk."

And for once words fail him and his head is as hollow as a drum.

"What about?"

"Anything. The walrus and the carpenter," she offers, knowing he's memorized that poem and that it comes from one of her favourite stories.

So he talks. He recites the long story with as much excitement and drama as he always has and Grace smiles and he watches her chest rise and fall because he has to know that she's still breathing.

The rise and fall get slower and shallower but he doesn't stop talking because if he stops talking then she'll be alone.

"The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things," he murmurs gently.

Her breaths are so shallow it's hardly enough to even stir the little strands of hair that hang in her thin pale face.

"Of shoes, and ships, and sealing wax—of cabbages and kings."

She lets out one long, slow, weak breath and her chest doesn't rise again.

"Of why the sea is boiling hot… and whether pigs… have wings…"

Her chest is still and her hair doesn't stir and the hand on his knee is limp, but on her face is her smile and he knows that even up to the end she's untroubled and happy. She is always untroubled and happy. She is the most good-natured person he has ever known.

_Was._

The fever house buries its dead in its own cemetery but most of the graves are unmarked. He cannot stand to think of Grace in a cold dark box and an unmarked grave so he goes about trying to purchase a headstone. He has so little money left—he hasn't been able to con for months now—that he must pass the hat himself.

He buys the headstone and has it placed where she's buried. _Grace Ann Hawking, b.1898 d.1923._ And with that it makes it more real to him. She truly is dead and gone forever.

Once upon a time, there was a man known as Hatter who lost the one person he ever truly cared for and didn't think he would ever be happy again.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Hatter needs his chocolate and cream cake now. Poor boy! Yes, I very nearly cried while writing the death scene. I guess I got a little attached to Grace, even though she's only been around for a chapter and a half. That, and her death makes Hatter so sad that I just want to hug him. I get too emotional about my fanfictions, I think.

I hope you enjoyed the read. Feedback is, as always, much appreciated.


	6. Chapter 6

Hatter does some bad things in this chapter. Grief makes people do weird things, I figure Hatter would probably be no different. He's just human, after all. It's also a rather long chapter and a lot happens here—but still not as long as I _have_ written. (Thank heavens.)

Disclaimer: I don't own Hatter's character, or this version of Wonderland. They belong to Nick Willing and the Sci-Fi channel. The original character and world are Lewis Carroll's.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a man named David, called Hatter, was lost.

It has been a long time since anyone knew why he was called Hatter since mostly now he doesn't care too much about anyone or anything in the world, including himself. He spends his days quietly and unscrupulously talking people out of their money and belongings but he doesn't do it with nearly the finesse and charm and almost honour that he once did. At night he can be found drinking his spoils in a pub.

He gets droolingly drunk and picks bar fights with anybody and everybody just so he has an excuse to hurt someone because the whole world needs to feel the same pain he feels all the time. He spends many a night in a drunken sleep on whatever horizontal surface he can find that will hold his weight, or in jail sleeping off the drink because he's found bumbling through the streets on watery legs and yelling angrily because that's all he is anymore—_angry._

He has become that which he used to want to protect others from.

In the back of his mind, he's almost vaguely aware of the fact that this is not the right way to deal with his grief and that he's just behaving stupidly and using other people's faces to bash all the knuckles on his right hand on. But whenever that little voice gets too loud he drowns it out with more drink and ignores it because he doesn't care anymore. As far as he is concerned, the sooner he dies from this the better.

He feels none of the good anymore, only the bad. Getting drunk doesn't make him feel happy, it just makes him feel nothing, but that's an improvement. He feels as if there's a black cloud over him all the time. He is cut off from the world. He has nothing. He _is_ nothing.

He has no perception of time and so has no idea how long this state lasts. Months, years? He doesn't know. I don't know either. I can't remember and I don't want to.

He is thrown out of one of the most rowdy and dangerous pubs in town for being too violently drunk and starting too many fights—which in retrospect is something of an achievement—and he is left to wander the streets while the world tilts from side to side around him. He grabs onto anything reasonably sturdy and anchored into the ground—telegraph poles, street lanterns, mail boxes, telephone boxes—and holds on because he can't stand up straight and he's so drunk he'll probably trip and miss the ground and fall off the face of the earth.

He gets hopelessly lost in the immediate vicinity of the pub and has no idea where he is or is going or has been, and it's too dark to read any street signs and in any case he's far too intoxicated to read any of them anyway. His vision is double and then triple and he wonders if maybe he shouldn't just settle down for a nice nap on the pavement, and then he hears something and it makes him raise his head and take notice.

A shriek. A little shriek, from a woman or a girl or possibly someone in between the two. His addled mind tries to focus on it and he squints down an alley and notices there's a man having some kind of confrontation with a girl.

Something clicks in his mind. Something stirs. He should remember something. This should mean something. He stands staring at the scene for a while as he sways back and forth, and what little power of actual conscious thought he has left is being used to figure out what he should be doing.

_Help her!_ is what that tiny voice in his head says. _Remember what you used to do! Remember! Help her!_

He stands there stupidly while he argues with himself. What can I do? he wonders, but he doesn't wonder for long because the girl shrieks again and he finds himself striding down the alley—or trying to stride and tripping on every single solitary pebble in the way. He knows what men do with young girls in dark alleys. He hates them for it. He himself is an unscrupulous man, a conman, but he would never grab a girl or woman and he despises any man who does.

"I said no!" She shrieks. "I don't want to! Don't touch me, don't hurt me! Please! Let me go, let me go!"

She struggles but she's powerless because the man is much bigger and he has her arms by the elbows so she can't hit him.

"Oi… you… you leddgo the grr." He punctuates it with a burp and his speech is so slurred that the man actually stops grabbing the girl in order to laugh at him.

Because he's so drunk he's not seen as a threat to the man's plan because he's either going to pass out and have that nap on the pavement now or he's just not going to remember any of it in the morning.

"Let go," he says again and this time it comes out as two words and not a mindless slur and belch. He stands tall—though 'tall' for Hatter isn't really intimidatingly tall at all—and he isn't leaning on anything but the world still sways and rocks violently around him. The man is concerned enough now that he stops battering the girl and turns his attention towards Hatter.

"This is none of your business," he growls. "Scum."

"No," he says back. "Leave her alone."

The girl is on the ground and she looks frightened because, he realizes, he must look a sight. He hasn't bathed or changed clothes in some time and he hasn't had a shave in a while, either, so to the scared girl on the cobbled ground it must look like he's just as scary as the man trying to grab her. After all, the other man is dressed well and is clean and Hatter looks like the drunkard he has become.

The scene is fuzzy and I can't remember all that happened but I'm glad I don't remember. There's a fight. The girl runs away at some point, she must do, because she isn't seen at the scene. Even with all of the commands to his limbs swimming upstream against all of that whiskey, Hatter manages to fight back and do so well enough to win, though whether it's because of skill or just flat-out luck he doesn't know and still I'm not sure which.

Either way, the last thing he does is reach back with his right arm and give the man one last good hit, an uppercut to the face and he falls like a bag of grain.

This time he doesn't move.

It registers in Hatter's mind that something perhaps isn't right, but his head is spinning and he's disoriented and his whole body has gone shaky and he can't focus on any one thing so he doesn't have the power or will to think about it. He stumbles blindly, leglessly, out of the alley and then he himself drops a few streets over and he spends the night in a garbage pile next to a factory.

It's the next day that he realizes what he's done.

The police find him sleeping off his drink in the garbage pile and they drag him into the station to bully him into talking. At first he has no idea what's going on and has to take several cups of very strong tea until his head is clear enough that he can process what's been going on.

The man is dead. The punch broke his nose and sent shards into his brain and he died in the alley. The police were quick to track him down because he dropped his hat near the body and was found unconscious in the rubbish heap with blood on his hands and on his trousers.

And because the dead man was one of their own.

He'd killed a policeman.

His memory is fuzzy because his head still aches and hurts and he's fairly certain that he broke his nose in last night's fight and the police investigating the death—the murder, really—of one of their comrades rough him and hit him until they can get the story out of him.

Stars explode in his head and behind his eyes as blows land and then, finally, gasping and dribbling drool and blood into his lap, he tells them what he remembers happening, which is essentially a confession and which he knows will land him in trouble.

His words are no longer magic. They are going to get him killed.

He is sentenced to hang.

He has plenty of time to think as he sits in the jail and awaits his day at the gallows and the more he thinks about it the more he realizes that the last thing in the world he wants to do now is die. He has been trying for so long to kill himself and now that death is staring him in the face it scares him it scares him it scares him.

There has to be something he can do. There has to be a way out. There has to be an escape. A break out of prison is hard to do and it's risky, because if they catch him they'll kill him on sight, but what has he got to lose? Nothing. The fact is that if he escapes he _could_ be killed but if he doesn't at least try he _will_ be so it's a risk he decides he has to take.

So he waits and watches and takes in everything around him. The guard who watches the prison at night is almost always a few minutes late; the one in the morning likes to taunt and torment the prisoners by waving his keys in front of them just out of their reach and lecture them. Some of them try futilely to grab the keys but most of the rest know better than to do that; Hatter watches carefully. He pays close attention to the keys. He knows which one unlocks his cell and he studies it and memorizes it until he knows the key's pattern inside and out, and then he waits for an opportunity to get any solid material with which he can work. He gets his hands on a piece of wood and works diligently, quietly, for hours on end. He has nothing sharp in his cell to work with so he's forced to use the only tool at his disposal: his teeth. He gnaws on the wood like a dog with a stick and it splinters into his tongue and gums but he knows this is his only way out so he ignores the pain and swallows the blood and keeps going.

Just a week before he is set to die, his plan is ready.

He only has a few minutes between the guards changing. When the evening man leaves, Hatter is pretending to sleep; as soon as he hears the big door close he leaps up and reaches one skinny arm out through the bars and tries to unlock the cell. Wood is softer than metal and he prays to anything that might be listening to him to please not let it break yet, not yet, and by some miracle the lock clicks open just as the wood gives out and cracks.

He is free.

The other prisoners are watching him with interest and they stay silent, knowing that there's always the chance he might let them out, too. He waits with his breath held until the night man comes in—two minutes late—and closes the door behind him. The man doesn't know what's hit him. Hatter flattens him and quickly ties him up and gags him and steals his clothes so that he can sneak out without being noticed. The man is fat and Hatter has never been a big man even when he was eating well, so it takes a few minutes of adjustment to hitch the man's trousers around his waist in such a way that he doesn't show his butt to the police station as he walks out. He feels like a little boy playing in his father's suit, but it's dark enough and late enough that no one bats an eye as he saunters out of the police station just because he's wearing a uniform.

But before he leaves he takes the keys and tosses them in the general direction of one of the cells. If he is going to be free, then they should be too. He has no idea who they are or what they've done, but if they aren't here in the morning they won't be around to rat on him when questions are asked.

As soon as he's out of the station and steps out into the dark cold night, panic sets in. He has no money and nowhere to go. He knows he can't stay here because every policeman within a hundred miles will be looking for him—policemen never take the death of one of their own well—so his only option is to leave, run. But to where?

He sees some men marching by and he dives into the dark, thinking they might be policemen, but they're dressed in funny suits and they don't even flicker their attention away from their path. Not policemen.

"The last are through. Now hurry, we're going soon," the one at the head of the line says, and that makes him sit up and take notice. Going? Where? Maybe he has one more con left in him. Maybe he can talk his way away from here with them, whoever they are.

He follows them quietly, watching around to make sure no one is following _him,_ and they turn at a right angle and head down an alley that he knows to be a dead end and he's confused but thinks perhaps they might have a truck or something waiting, and he waits until the last of them has gone down the alley and then he follows them.

There is no truck.

There are no men.

There's only an enormously ornate mirror with a gilt frame that looks spectacularly out of place here in the dark dirty alley. It wasn't here the last time he was here, so where did it come from, whose is it, and why hasn't it been stolen yet?

This alley is a dead end and he _knows_ they've come down this way, so where have they gone? He walks in front of the mirror. He looks terrible. He's got prison pallor and his face is thin and his hair is dirty and the too-big clothes hang on him. He leans in closer to the mirror and tries to wipe some of the scum and dirt off of his face, and when he does he stumbles and falls and the next thing he knows he's falling and falling and falling.

When he's next aware he's disoriented and confused and he's face-down in a patch of some springy grass and odd-looking flowers in what looks like an old abandoned factory. He has no idea how long he's been here or how he's got here or where the hell 'here' is. The whole place creaks and stinks and scares him. There is no one around. He gets up and hikes up those too-big trousers and cautiously begins to try to get his bearings.

Wherever he is, it isn't planned well. Doors lead through to other doors and rooms filled with water and rooms filled with junk and some doors lead through to two feet of ledge and then a sheer drop no less than a zillion miles straight down. He wanders and wanders and wanders but he never sees another person, for which he is glad. The last thing he needs is to get caught here, wherever he is, and have to explain himself. He needs time. Time to figure things out.

When he _does_ see someone—a gentleman in a light grey suit with long white hair—his first instinct is to dive into hiding. He squeezes himself into the gap between two buildings and waits there and hopes that he isn't found and clearly luck is with him again because nobody _does_ find him. He sidles along the ledges, unsure of himself at first, and makes his way to a bridge and to another building, where he's sure there are still more doors that lead to weird places. He'll learn it all eventually, he's sure, but for the time being this seems like the best place to hide.

He needs to hide.

He needs to think.

He needs a plan.

Once upon a time, a man who was called Hatter got lost and decided that getting lost was a good enough way as any to start over.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

And finally, Wonderland makes an appearance! I figure, Wonderland would represent a big chunk of Hatter's life, but not a huge chunk of his formative years. Which is why Wonderland comes into the story so late.

Anyway. I hope you enjoyed this chapter. The next chapter will be up on schedule.


	7. Chapter 7

The first _official_ Hatter in Wonderland chapter! It frustrated me immensely to write about his time in Wonderland before Alice came along. I don't know why, it just did. Drove me mad as a hatter. (What, no?)

Disclaimer: Hatter and this version of Wonderland—basically anything you recognize—don't belong to me and I'm not profiting from their use.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time there was a man who called himself Hatter, who though he must have fallen through the looking-glass and ended up in some bizarre kind of Wonderland.

He's been here a while but he has no idea how long and he's losing his perception of time. He's started to call the place 'Wonderland' in his head, even though this is nothing like the book he read as a child. He's naming all the places and buildings and levels and bridges so he can get his bearings and figure out where he is. He's stopped getting lost and he knows some of the easiest routes to get from one place to another. He's learning, he's watching, he's hiding, and he's waiting. He will survive here and he may even do more than survive. It is just a matter of time.

He agonizes for a time over how to leave—how did he get here, and how can he get back?—but he knows that this is a stupid idea. Wherever he is now is relative safety, because back in England he's a wanted man and every policeman in the British Isles will be looking for him, an escaped policeman's murderer, and if this place is the frying pan then that is the fire. Neither is good but he's safer where he is.

There's nothing left for him in England and he knows it; his only option is to start over here, wherever 'here' is. He's not happy about it. I'm not sure he was ever completely all right with it. It was just what had to be done.

Possible death in this strange place is better than certain death in England. He'll do what he must to survive, as he always has.

He's quickly learned that this place, this Wonderland, is full of oddities. He's already encountered some kind of enormous flying metal machine—like a zeppelin or a dirigible—with enormous searching-lights on it that left some kind of inexplicable burn pattern on his skin. His first instinct when he saw it was to _leap_ out of the way, which he did, but he did it so quickly that the too-big trousers slipped off and a little part of his thigh came in contact with the light. It's left a strange green burn-mark at the top of his thigh near his backside and no amount of scratching or scrubbing can get it to go away, but just so long as he keeps his trousers on nobody will see it. It must mean something. He'll pretend it doesn't exist until he has some more answers.

He decides he needs to get new clothes. Somehow. He has no money to pay for anything, but something tells him that money won't do him much good here. Luck once again falls into his lap when he discovers a man snoring away on a bridge with an enormous stupid grin on his face. Even in sleep he looks completely vacant. He's got a bottle clutched in his hand; it has a label on it that simply reads 'Bliss', and he's not sure if that's some kind of alcohol or drug or something else, but whatever it is it's made the man so completely unconscious that he doesn't notice he's being quickly and quietly eased out of his clothes.

He leaves the fat police guard's uniform with the man—he shouldn't have to wander about naked, after all—and makes off. The other man's clothes are still big on him but fit him better than the uniform had and he's not continually hiking up his trousers so there's very little risk that anyone will see the burn mark.

Still, the new clothes make him feel a little bit better so he walks down the narrow ledge as if he's been doing so all his life. The trick, he knows, is to pretend he belongs here as much as everyone else. If he looks like he fell from the sky and landed here, then people will _think_ he fell through the sky and landed here. He knows that appearance is half the game. It always has been.

He just has to learn to play the game a little differently. But that's no trouble for him. If there is one thing Hatter knows how to do, it's adapt.

He comes across something he hasn't seen here much—people, lots of them. They're queuing up to get somewhere and it looks like they're anxious. From a nearby ledge-walkway, he follows the queue around to see where they're all going. It looks like a party, one of the society parties he used to talk his way into. There's a man by the door with a piece of paper, clearly checking off the invited guests and the invited guests alone.

Hatter grins and instinct takes over. He smoothes out his coat and shirt and quickly runs a hand through his hair. He straightens up and holds his head high and makes his way to the queue. He strides confidently to the front as if he's supposed to be there. The doorman stops him.

"You'll have to wait," the man says. "Like everyone else."

"I beg your pardon, I got lost in there and ended up outside," he says apologetically, banking on there being some doors in this place that lead to odd places since every other place in this weird Wonderland has doors that go to funny places. "I came with a friend, he'll be looking for me."

The man rolls his eyes but he doesn't challenge Hatter's excuse and begrudgingly flicks back through the pages. "Name?"

"Geoff," he says quickly. He uses simple common names like that in order to get into parties he isn't invited to, because it's almost guaranteed that someone with a name like Geoff or John or Jack will have been invited.

The doorman looks at him with his eyes wide for Hatter feels his heart begin to pound, but experience tells him to keep his face level and his head cool. He has to buy his own charade before anyone else will believe it.

"Is there a problem?" He asks, feigning insult that he isn't being taken seriously.

"Geoff? Mad March?"

"Indeed," Hatter says. "We're old friends, he'll be wondering where I've got to. Unless you want to call him away from the party and bring _him_ out _here,"_ he says as a way of a threat, because with a moniker like 'Mad March' this character is most certainly someone that nobody wants to tangle with. "It'd be easier just to let me in."

"Yes, yes, right away, sir," the doorman stutters and steps aside quickly and lets him into the building and Hatter is so pleased with himself he can hardly stand it. He's still got it. He's still got the power in his words to make the world—even this weird one—do what he wants.

It comes as a relief. He's still talking. His heart's still beating. He's still alive.

It looks like most of the other elegant parties he's been to. He's pleased to note there's plenty of food around. It looks exotic and weird but it's _food,_ which he hasn't had in quite a long time. Still, he's careful. If he can't identify it he won't put it in his mouth and he steers clear of the table full of bottles and bottles of colourful liquids. They look tempting and clearly they're the most popular thing on the tables, but he doesn't want to take too many chances. Not here. Not now. Not with someone called Mad March lurking about.

Even with his guard up, he talks with people. It's been so long since he's done this he's forgotten the thrill, the exhilaration. He's doing something he shouldn't be doing and he has no right to be here and not only is he getting away with it, he's also proving to be quite popular. He's back in his element. His words work. He's charming everybody.

And then comes Mad March.

He can pick Mad March out of the crowd almost instantly because he _looks_ mad. He's impossibly tall and has wild brown hair and yellow eyes—so help me god, _yellow eyes—_that keep looking wildly around the room. The crowd parts for him. This is a man people respect or fear or both.

He doesn't have to be hugely astute to figure out that this is a man he needs to stay clear of for the time being, so he keeps one eye on Mad March as he makes his way around the room.

It's several hours after his arrival when a fight breaks out. Something's gone wrong at the drinks table where all of those colourful drinks were kept—someone's taken the last of something and dammit the rest of the guests are not pleased, and soon the party becomes a bar fight and Hatter decides he should probably make his escape.

Even though he hasn't been near the drinks table all night, someone sees fit to reach out of the crowd and hit him while he's trying to make his way to a door—any door—and get out. The punch comes as a surprise and he's dazed for a full two seconds before he turns around and lams the person who did it. Or, he _thinks_ it's the person who did it, he's not sure, but that's the general area it came from. It doesn't really matter. Decorum has vanished and the room is an all-out brawl.

The only way he can make it through the crowd is to charge through like a bull and swing at anything that gets near him. He doesn't have enough room to draw his hand back the whole way so his hits aren't as hard as they could be, but he can still duck and dodge as he makes his way out.

He never thought he would be happy to be back on the narrow ledge, but he is when he gets there he _is_ glad and he breathes a sigh of relief as soon as he's run a reasonably good distance from the action.

This Wonderland is weird and _dangerous._

He sneaks into another party a while later because that's the only place he can think of to find food—nothing grows in this concrete jungle—and the result is the same. It seems to be a normal party for a little while and then it dissolves into chaos when the drink runs out.

So he decides to stay clear of those parties.

But he can't live like this forever—he's adopted a little rat-hole of a room that's dirty and smells like mildew and he's been living in the same clothes that are now also dirty and smell of mildew. He has to adapt. He has to come up with another plan.

He needs to work his way into someone's favour if he's ever going to make it here. He has to keep talking. So he can survive.

He knows little about 'society' here. He's heard mention of a Queen but has no idea who she is or anything about her; there doesn't seem to be any established pecking order. The only person he knows of who has any kind of renown at all is Mad March, who is feared and admired at the same time. Mad March is mad and frightening, but people respect him and Hatter knows nowhere else to turn.

In order to sneak into another party he needs get another set of clothes. It's sometimes ages before he sees another person around here, so he lies in wait for someone to cross his path.

He's been reduced to this—to mugging people and stealing their clothes. He should feel bad about it. He knows he should. But he doesn't. He needs to survive. His own survival comes ahead of others. There's no point in trying to keep any honour in his craft—being careful and being decent is what got him here and caring about someone other than himself is what killed him. So to survive he must care about himself and no one else. He has to keep moving. He has to keep talking.

These clothes aren't like the last set he stole. He's not sure what to make of these, except for the fact that they fit. Red trousers, patterned silk shirt, a black velvet jacket, and a black hat with a red feathered pin. He knows he's not going to blend in dressed like this, but this time blending in isn't his intent. He needs to make an impression.

He has no way of knowing where the gatherings will be and _definitely_ doesn't know where Mad March will be, so he has to work on guesses alone. He quickly talks his way into another party and begins to scan the room.

Fortunately, Mad March is easy to find, and sure enough there he is. Hatter steels himself and takes a deep breath and decides it's now or never. Confidence will help him when he deals with someone like this, just as well as appearance.

While other people carefully make a path for March to get through, Hatter strides up to him. He introduces himself as Hatter and tells March that he's always wanted to meet him and has always been a great admirer of his work. In truth he has no idea what it is that Mad March _does_ and he's sure it would be something that would scare him stupid, but he knows that people like March have egos and he has to play to that ego in order to win him over.

It doesn't work straight away. March is a suspicious fellow—suspicious and quite mad—but Hatter is just as patient as March is suspicious and he knows the art of waiting. He accidentally-on-purpose runs into him a few more times and eventually Mad March talks to him.

He's a hard nut to crack and it's clear that he will tolerate Hatter only as long as he feels like Hatter is useful or interesting, but Hatter is persistent and he's good with his words and he knows that everyone—_everyone—_will crack eventually. It's a matter of changing his tactics and manipulating people.

Mad March is his in.

Hatter will make this corrupted Wonderland his home.

Once upon a time, a man named David stopped existing all together.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Why Geoff? Because the actor in the cookie jar's name is Geoff. It's just one of those things I felt like doing. And I've marked Hatter on his butt. Well, it would explain how nobody's seen it, wouldn't it? It also gives me an excuse to put Hatter's butt in the story because frankly he's got a butt worth having in a story. He's back to his old self again, at least. Hatter's a fast-talker. And one smart cookie. He could do pretty much anything.


	8. Chapter 8

Another chapter that gave me problems. Argh! I'm slowly losing my mind over here. Writing about Hatter with Alice is easy for me, and writing about Hatter as an Oyster or as a regular ol' Wonderland guy is easy for me, but for whatever reason writing him as an Oyster-in-Wonderland is _so freaking hard._ I don't get it. C'est ma vie, I suppose.

Disclaimer: This version of Wonderland and the character of Hatter don't belong to me. I'm just borrowing him for a bit so I can put him in awkward situations.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time there was a man called Hatter, who forgot.

This jungle, this city, this corrupted Wonderland has been his home for a long time. It _has to_ be Wonderland. He can't think of anything else it might be. He knows of White Rabbit and the Queen of Hearts, and he sees men zipping overhead sometimes on mechanical pink flamingos, and some people reference 'Alice of Legend' who once upon a time came in and knocked down the Queen's whole house of cards. The world is nonsense and weird. It must be Wonderland. What else could it be?

He has mostly forgotten the world outside and sometimes it doesn't even occur to him that a world outside of Wonderland _exists,_ let alone that he's originally from that world.

Life for him is good. He is pleased with himself that he can still talk his way into or out of anything, and that his talent works here, too, even though the whole place is steeped in madness and nonsense. He is a fast talker, a conman, a player. He looks out for himself and no one else. The ability to charm has given him a 'tea shop', which is a slang term in this world for something completely different, and he's got contacts and acquaintances with enough powerful people that nobody challenges him. And whoever he cannot charm—which is to say very few people—is easily dispatched with his fists. He's known for his dangerous 'sledgehammer' of a right arm, which has always been his strongest and he's been fighting people with for a long time.

Wonderland has become his home.

He has everybody fooled. No one thinks he's anything other than a Wonderlander. The light on the Scarab—as he finds out that floating thing is called—will burn and mark someone once and only once because White Rabbit figures once is all that's needed, and indeed most marks on the 'Oysters' are someplace prominent, on faces and necks and arms and chests. It's never occurred to anyone that perhaps the first mark will be made somewhere that nobody will see it. But then again, why _would_ it? How many people stumble into Wonderland without pants on?

No matter.

It doesn't take Hatter long to dive headlong into their culture of Oysters and 'tea', which isn't even tea by even the broadest definition of the term. It isn't drink, either, which is what he thought those colourful bottles were when he first arrived. He's had to pretend he knows what they all are because to be ignorant would betray his identity as an escaped Oyster—the people milked dry of their emotions and cast aside when they become little more than husks—so he's spent time watching and listening and deciphering. Wonderland denizens were addicted to their weird Oyster Tea the way he'd once seen people addicted to opium and heroin, long ago when he wasn't Hatter.

And it only takes once for him to realize why they're so hooked.

It's a myth that in Wonderland people have no emotions to experience; they are much like regular people except that they are always surrounded by madness and nonsense. No, the appeal behind Oyster Tea is that it is so intense, so strong, so easy to come by. One can work hard to become happy or blissful or feel love, or one can simply take the tea and feel emotion a thousand times more concentrated and powerful. The emotions of a dozen, of twenty, of _fifty_ people are taken and make up one little bottle. It has been drawn from Oysters and concentrated and condensed and it becomes so powerful and intoxicating that Wonderland is a slave to it.

And for a time so is Hatter.

It's wonderful. He doesn't have to _think_ or _do_ anything at all; all he needs to do is drink and _feel_ and he feels none of the bad, only the good. His whole life behind him, the pain and the madness, the loss, the anger—it all disappears with one swift dose of that lovely colourful Oyster Tea.

Not thinking and not feeling come as a relief.

Life is so much simpler without needing to exert any great mental strain.

Every time a new emotion becomes available he's one of the first to get his hands on it, because he has a tea shop and after all, he must sample all of the products he's expected to sell. 'Bliss' and 'Carefree' and 'Excitement' and 'Relief' and 'Happiness' and 'Lust' and mostly just any consciousness-altering substance he can come by. If it's there, he wants it. He'll try it.

His head is in a fog.

He prefers it that way. The less he has to think, the better.

And the days and months and years pass.

Hatter forgets. There is just the here and the now and the 'future' is nothing more than his next high. There isn't a past and there isn't a world outside of Wonderland.

Time passes differently here in Wonderland than he's used to. Or he thinks it does. He isn't sure. Maybe it's his foggy head. He's fairly sure he has been here an extremely long time but he doesn't feel like he's any older. He should notice that, right? Has Wonderland made him immortal? Is he aging slower? Or are all of those concentrated bottled emotions messing with his perception of time?

He doesn't know it, but Oysters stay fresh a long time in Wonderland—people in general age much slower in Wonderland than outside, but it extends to the outsiders, the Oysters, as well. They don't age, or at least they don't age nearly at the rate they would outside the Looking Glass. Time passes normally and they simply stay the same way. After all, wouldn't want them to age and die before they can be drained of their little shiny pearls, would they? I don't know how it happens—I never have. Nothing in Wonderland ever surprised me. I learned a long time ago that if I questioned too much of the madness then I risked going mad myself.

As time goes by he, like everyone else, needs more and more to get his fix. A few drops used to do just fine to give him the high he wanted, but now it doesn't and he needs cups and cups full of the stuff before he even gets a buzz.

He is just like them. Dumb, docile, controlled, dependent on that precious Oyster Tea.

He's forgotten almost everything about his life. He's only vaguely aware that he had a life before his tea shop and he was human once but he doesn't remember any significant detail about it and he's kept in such a constant buzz and fog and high that he doesn't care enough to try.

Until…

He is frequently called away from his comfortable little grassy office to deal with disturbances in his tea shop when people get too rowdy and from people who have overdosed on tea. On and on for years and years he's seen what happens to the people who overdose—they go catatonic or they die or they have to spend time in the Hospital of Dreams, and goodness knows what happens in there—but he doesn't care one whit about them so long as he still gets his tea-buzz.

It's late afternoon when he's summoned from his nice little Bliss-induced nap on his desk in order to deal with a man who's collapsed on the floor after overdosing on Carefree. The man is giggling a curious high-pitched giggle and babbling incoherently and disturbing his other customers so he drags the man outside.

"How does—little croc—golden scales," he's burbling between those weird girl-giggles. It sounds familiar but for the life of him Hatter can't figure out where it's from or how he's supposed to know it.

"Come on, you better wake up," he tells him. "If you do that out here in the street they'll lock you up, you know."

And then the man sits up very suddenly.

"I have to return a library book!" He declares loudly, his eyes suddenly wide and he looks very alert.

And then his eyes roll back and he flops down again.

Library? What's a library? He should know that too, shouldn't he? It sounds familiar but he's still loopy from his Bliss and his eyes are drooping and it's far too much work for his tea-addled little husk of a brain to handle. So he drops the man on the pavement a reasonable distance from his tea shop—nothing scares people away from an establishment like a possibly-dead man outside the door—and stumbles back into his office and falls asleep on his desk.

That night he dreams—he hasn't dreamed in _ages—_and in his dream there's walls and walls of books on all sides of him, rising up further than the eye can see. Something about the dream makes him inexplicably _happy_ and it can't be tea because he hasn't had any Happiness in a few days. There are books everywhere and something about them stirs something within him and he tries, he tries, he tries to remember what it is but the answer is out of his grasp.

Then he feels desperation because he wants to know the answer so he grabs at the shelf but the book is blank. He grabs another but it, too, is blank, and so is the next one and the next after that. There are no words. The covers have no titles and the spines are blank. Where are the words? What's going on? For the first in a long time he feels confusion, worry, because he's _trying_ to remember but he can't.

He wakes up in a cold sweat.

His head hurts.

What does it all mean?

It torments him off and on for days. At first he wants to drown it out with tea, but then he doesn't anymore because he wants answers.

He puts stupid sleepy Dormy in charge for the day because one day with Dormy in charge can't cause his establishment too much irreparable damage. He skips his morning doses of tea and pours them into his grassy carpet. He needs to think.

He walks and walks and walks and his mind is reeling like it hasn't done in ages and in his head he can hear the terrible crunching of long-rusted gears and a machine in pain as his mind works in a way it hasn't needed to do in a long time. He needs to think, he needs to remember. What was that dream about? What did it mean? Was it the man who overdosed—did he stir something? A library, and the thing about the crocodile… it meant something. To _him_ it meant something, or at least it once did. He wanted to remember.

Down a ways and on the level below his shop there's a row of plain blue doors where people live, or squat, or just crash to sleep of their highs. Most of them are his customers.

He knocks on one door and he's not sure why but something tells him he should.

A man slides open the peep-slot and a pair of eyes and their grizzled eyebrows look at him.

"I—I have to return a library book," he says. He doesn't know why but he thinks it's the right thing to say.

The man answers back, "How does the little crocodile improve his shining tail?"

The words spill out of him quickly, without his brain being involved in the process. "He pours the waters of the Nile on every golden scale."

And the door opens.

It's a password, a code, it must be. There is more still to Wonderland, more he doesn't know of.

Inside is a man sitting in a bus with his hands on all the controls. He beckons Hatter inside and the door closes and with the jerk of a few levers the whole contraption plummets down, down, down so fast that Hatter's sure he's left half of his guts up where they started and he hopes his innards all land in the right place when he finally stops.

Then the door opens.

He's somewhere dark and dank, the lights of torches flickering on the wall and a familiar smell in the air—a smell of old paper, leather, book glue, wood—and his memory stirs.

A library. A library?

_Remember, remember!_ the voice in the back of his head chimes in, a voice he hasn't heard in forever. He's drowned it out before with alcohol and then with Oyster Tea but now that there's nothing clouding his mind he can hear it. It commands him, it's stern, it demands him to dig deep, deep and remember because this should mean something to him. He has to remember.

_Think, stupid, think! Wake up! Wake up!_

His head actually hurts from the effort of thinking.

A_ library!_

It all comes flooding back in a rush like a dam has broken and suddenly his head is clearer than it's been in years and he finds it even more intoxicating than if he'd taken all the tea in his shop all at once.

He rushes over to the balcony and he looks down and below him there are books everywhere, on shelves and piled up and scattered around. Books, books, words!

He remembers—he _remembers!_

Names and titles and words, words, _words_ flood into his mind. Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, Robert Frost. They were important to him once. They meant something to him once. They had to still.

The man who took him here and a shrivelled little woman—both holding guns—grab him and rough him up and point their weapons at him. A man who won't tell him his name ties him to a chair and interrogates him and on instinct he tries to talk his way out of it. He hasn't had time to take everything in so he's not sure what approach is going to work so he takes a guess and tells the man that he was directed here and was told they could help him, and he's relieved when the ploy works.

He has stumbled into this whether he likes it or not. If he backs out they will see it as a double-cross and they'll kill him, but he can use his position in the tea shop to his advantage. They don't trust him right away and he knows he's going to have to prove to them that he's trustworthy, but as long as he can have access to this library, this treasure trove of _words,_ he doesn't care.

He'll do whatever he must to get what he wants.

Once upon a time, a man once called David remembered what it felt like to be human.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

There was an unnecessary amount of trouble involved in writing this chapter. I like it a lot better now that I've read it over (several weeks after I wrote it!), but you'd be surprised how hard it was to write. Like I said, I really can't figure it!

I hope you enjoyed the read. Reviews and feedback are, as always, greatly loved and appreciated—but never demanded.


	9. Chapter 9

Argh! This part of the story gave me the hardest time. Ever. I think I rewrote it three times before I found something that worked. Very frustrating! I hope you enjoy it for all the trouble it gave me.

Disclaimer: Hatter and this version of Wonderland and Mad March and basically everything you recognize aren't my property and I'm not profiting from their use. Foo.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time there was a man called Hatter, who lived in a precarious position in a dangerous place.

He plays both sides once again. On the one hand, he runs a Tea House where Wonderland's vacant-eyed junkies and addicts come to get their daily fix. He is contributing to the Queen of Hearts and her plan to control all of Wonderland with her instant gratification and powerful, intoxicating, pure condensed emotion by distributing it to the people who live on the stuff.

On the other hand, he's gone from being a greenhorn to a foot-soldier to an inside-man for the Resistance. The fighters who want nothing more than to overthrow the Queen. What she's doing isn't right, snatching up Oysters—people—and taking them away from their homes and using them in her casino to milk them dry of their emotions. He has a position of power, friends in high places, and he's able to use this to use his power to procure things necessary for the Resistance and smuggle them into their hiding place, the Great Library.

Never mind that he himself was an Oyster once—he doesn't think of himself as one anymore; he has been here too long for him to think of himself as anything other than a Wonderlander—or that coming here in some weird way saved his life. He remembers enough of his old life that if he stayed there, he would be dead.

Neither side is fond of Oysters. To the Suits and the junkies, he would be seen as just another thing to crack open and drain of his emotions; to the Resistance, he'd be seen as a source of their problems, the things _being_ drained and used to control Wonderland. Their desire to send the Oysters home has less to do with altruism and more to do with cutting off the Queen's power.

What he wants in return for helping the Resistance is access to their Library. He has given up the Oyster Tea because his continued presence in the Resistance requires it; he needs to keep his head clear, anyway, and he doesn't want to be dependant on anything. Being dependant on something is a weakness and weakness is something he can't afford to have. He is still out for himself, and himself only, but if he has to play a dangerous game to get their precious books then so be it—he's played dangerous games before. In any case, their books mean more to him than the tea ever has. The feelings they stir in him—the emotions, the memories—are more powerful and gratifying because he makes them himself in his own head. Maybe it's because he's still human, but he doesn't miss the tea at all. This is better.

But his life is dangerous, precarious. He kisses what asses need kissing in order to ensure his continued safety and survival. In the end either the Resistance or the Hearts will win and if he has one foot firmly planted on each side of the fight then whichever side wins he will have a place in.

Something scares him about the idea of the Hearts and the Suits being in power forever. He has no real loyalty to them because he's scared of them—he has contacts in high places, but not friends. He has no loyalty to Mad March, either, but Mad March is an ass that most definitely needs a lot of attention. He is as much a dedicated addict as anyone else. His poison of choice is the dangerous combination of Excitement and Lust—which affects him differently than it affects most people because his lust is for _blood_ and _torture_—which he uses to fuel his madness. He spends time in Hatter's tea shop, and Hatter has to pretend to be his friend. Or not his friend, because March doesn't have any use for friends, but he makes March think he's loyal and useful to him and admires him, which is what March wants.

Except because of his position, the Resistance have yet to trust him fully. He is escorted with his hands over his head into the Great Library by armed guards and only allowed short visits at a time. He has to eat, in front of Dodo, any food he brings them to prove to them it isn't laced with poison. They don't trust him, because he refuses to live in the dark with them and so formally commit himself to their cause, even though he smuggles in food and medicine and blankets and keeps their secret. They still don't trust him.

He has to prove himself to them. He wants freedom to move freely on both sides of the law.

The gears in his head begin turning. If he wants to prove himself to them, he has to pull off an enormous and elaborate plan. He has to remember the tricks, the game, the hunt—once he was good at this, he _has to_ have one more.

Except for the Queen, there is one person the Resistance is afraid of more than anyone else.

Mad March.

So he starts to plan.

If he can get rid of Mad March, the Resistance will have to trust him. Getting rid of Mad March sounds like an appealing plan anyway, because a world without March would be great for everybody in Wonderland, with the possible exception of Mad March himself.

The Queen will notice if her favourite little sadistic play-thing just suddenly goes missing or dies, so Hatter knows that _she_ must be the one who dispatches him.

He must set Mad March up to fail. The Queen doesn't take failures—she won't take March failing, either.

The plan takes time, lots of time. It has to be perfect, because one false move will doom both him and the Resistance to death or worse. It will be his greatest work yet, he decides with a kind of cockiness. A _Mona Lisa_ of plots. He has to talk the Dodo into accepting his plot, which he doesn't do because he thinks it's reckless and far too risky, so Hatter turns his attention elsewhere. The Resistance isn't as organized as they like to think themselves to be, so instead he works on convincing a few fringe fighters to help him in his endeavours.

Hatter is a smart man. He can do this. He just has to wait.

Once a week or so, Suits come to visit his tea shop to make sure everything is running smoothly and make sure they aren't harbouring any Resistance fighters or any loyalties to the Resistance itself. They're mindless little automatons so it's easy to fool them and he keeps his business secret. But every so often Mad March comes into his shop for tea and conversation, even though Hatter knows that's not _really_ why he's there. Mad March is there to scare him, to keep him in line. For all anyone knows, he's still a tea junkie and therefore easy to control, but the Queen likes a healthy dose of intimidation along with her control, just in case any of her 'rabble' decide to put a toe out of line.

March isn't a mindless drone like the Suits are—he's harder to fool and Hatter has to keep his guard up, his walls in place, all the time around him, and he has to do so without making it seem like he's doing it.

He gives March some of the rarest and most exotic and sought-after teas when he comes to visit and March is pleased with his perceived power over Hatter. He has it in his mad head that Hatter wants him to get him closer to the Queen and March dangles the possibility in front of his nose like a carrot and he lets him believe it works. If there's one thing he's learned from years of playing these games, it's that sometimes his talking is wholly unnecessary because people will fool themselves just fine with their own preconceptions and biases. It makes his job easier, certainly, and it provides invaluable insight.

Mad March isn't loyal to the Queen, either, but the Queen gets him what he wants and lets him live quite comfortably, and he's so unbalanced and psychotic that he simply can't fathom that other people might want something else.

That's March's biggest weakness, his shortcoming; as good as he is at tracking and sniffing out people and killing them for his own sadistic pleasure, he doesn't know _people,_ doesn't comprehend their subtleties and differences the way Hatter does.

He can't manipulate Mad March the way he wants to and _needs to_ with his words alone, so he quietly goes about using another tactic and putting his plan in motion.

He constructs a fake trail of breadcrumbs, false evidence of the Resistance. Between the city and the Hearts Casino, there are enormous chunks of Wonderland that's all forest and mountain and feral madness and from the outside it seems a good place for rebels and refugees to set up their bases, even though one would have to be madder than mad to actually do so. The deep forests of Wonderland are the domain of monsters and beasties that defy imagination, and of the Knights, who were once the protectors of Wonderland long before the Queen took power. Now all that's left are the monsters and few who venture in find their way out.

Still, the Hearts and the Suits think the Resistance _are_ that mad—because who in their right mind would rally against the powerful emotions of Oyster Tea?—so it's not hard to start rumours that the Resistance fighters are hiding there.

When all of the pieces are in place, he begins to turn March onto his fake trail. Hatter has to play him like he's never played him before. Because of his position in his Tea House, Hatter is sometimes seen as a good source of information for the Suits, because he's a hub where people gather. Hatter plays his role expertly and dismisses the rumours straight away when the Suits come for their weekly visit.

By insisting there's no truth to the rumours at all and that it would be an absurdly dangerous mission to undertake, going into the lair of the Jabberwocky to look for rebels—after all, couldn't the Jabberwocky take care of them on its own?—he plants the seed in Mad March's deranged mind that the mission _is_ worth undertaking. Sometimes the easiest way to make a dog charge ahead is by pulling it back and by pulling March back, Hatter knows he's going to demand to go forward.

March looks himself, first, and finds Hatter's evidence in the forest—campsites, snares, tracks, and, most notably, a few dusty old tomes from the Great Library that are deemed worth sacrificing in order to sell the story. The small group of Resistance fighters and Hatter have spent months dutifully putting this evidence together for March, at enormous risk to life and limb; they live on tenterhooks in the forest because every single solitary sound means a Jabberwocky is nearby, or bandersnatch, or snark, or worse. But March buys the story when he sees the books because the Resistance are well known to be the guardians of the ancient Great Library.

So Mad March brings a small, elite team into the forest and right into their trap.

The failure is spectacular. Even March's posse is no match for the ancient and unimaginable monsters of Wonderland's forests, and almost all of them are torn apart by the creatures and those who aren't are forced to retreat. The more fanatical members of the resistance—which is to say almost all of them—wish they could have been there to see Mad March fleeing for his life as his comrades are killed, but Hatter doesn't have that taste for blood.

The Queen is so furious with March for having taken _rumours from the rabble_ seriously and wasting all of those resources doing something so stupid without her orders or her consent that she orders him beheaded. The Queen of Hearts doesn't take failure or incompetence well. Even if she regrets killing her favourite play-thing later on, what she's done is irreversible.

"It was stupid and it was reckless," Dodo tells him when next Hatter sees him. "You could have betrayed our location and brought down the entire Resistance! You didn't wait for approval, we should have you killed!"

Hatter says nothing and keeps his face calm but he worries that Dodo might actually do something to him—Dodo's never liked him, after all, and he always carries a gun—but to his surprise he thanks him.

"You were lucky. Extremely lucky. But you've managed to divert attention from us for a time. So… thank you."

It looks like it physically hurts to thank him and that gives Hatter a sort of sadistic glee because he doesn't like Dodo anymore than Dodo likes him.

The Resistance still doesn't trust him, not completely, and he doesn't think they ever will, but if nothing else they know he's capable of helping them and they know he's useful to them so they decide he's worth keeping around.

He will keep playing them.

And keep talking. He _has_ to keep talking because that's how he survives here. As long as he talks, he's still alive. All he has to do is talk forever.

Once upon a time, there was a two-faced man called Hatter, who stood on both sides of the law and he didn't intend to move. One side would win out in the end, and he wanted to make sure he was on the winning side—whichever it was.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Like I said before—writing about Oyster!Hatter in Wonderland is giving me such a freaking hard time. It's ridiculous! Le sigh. I can't figure out why. I was just very, very glad to move on from this; the next chapter catches up with the miniseries, and it was much more fun to write.

I hope you enjoyed to read!


	10. Chapter 10

Finally! The story has caught up to the events in 'Alice'. Let me tell you, it was a _relief!_

Disclaimer: Hatter, Alice, Ratty, the Queen, Wonderland—everything you recognize from the show—are not my property and I'm not benefiting in any way from their use. Also not my invention are small shreds of dialogue taken from the show. You'll know them when you see them.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, there was Alice.

Ratty brings her to him, soaking wet in a little blue dress and red tights with her hair sticking to her face and her shoulders. The mark on her arm betrays her at once as an escaped Oyster and when he sees it he can swear he feels the mark on his backside twinge.

She is just like him.

Ratty—slow, stupid, dirty, witless, mindless, tea-addled Ratty—thinks he's scored a huge find just because her name is Alice and she's wearing a blue dress. Everyone knows the Alice of Legend wore a blue dress, but Alice of Legend was also supposed to be ten years old, which this Alice most certainly isn't. Or if she is, then ten-year-old girls have changed immeasurably since his time on the other side of the Looking Glass.

Of course she's not really _that_ Alice, because _that_ Alice came to Wonderland 150 years ago, _long_ before he was ever here, and, he reminds Ratty, Oysters don't even live that long—never mind that Hatter is an Oyster himself and by his estimation he's over a hundred years old in 'real time'.

He pays the smelly rat-catcher with a bottle of 'Excitement'. The bottles have gotten smaller in the last several years because the techniques for capturing and condensing emotion from the Oysters have been advanced. Someone called 'Carpenter' is the Queen's newest pet, her head scientist, and has been making improvements to the Casino. Oysters are drained of emotion faster and the resulting emotions are stronger, which must suit the Queen just fine because it means less work gets more of what she wants.

It also means new Oysters are needed quicker than before, because they don't last as long as they used to.

He looks Alice up and down because she's _there_ and she's pretty and soaking wet and, after all, he's only a man, and the look in her eyes is hard, like a challenge. And Hatter loves a challenge. He asks her how she escaped and she says she used her hairpin, and almost at once he likes her. She's clever.

Hatter sees in her much of the same bewilderment that he felt himself in his first few terrified days in Wonderland. He remembers what that feels like, alone and confused and frightened and overwhelmed and the emotions are as powerful as if he was experiencing them all over again. But at least she's not alone, like he was, even if she doesn't know it.

And then he finds out she's looking for a boyfriend and immediately and inexplicably he feels his chest plummet into his gut. Why? He's known her for two minutes.

She doesn't want to go back through the Looking Glass, not without him, and she's so adamant and stubborn and inside he feels yet more memory stirring and he agrees to help her find him because he remembers what it feels like to love someone so completely and want to do anything for them. He has long moved on from Grace, but he hasn't forgotten her and he hasn't forgotten that love makes people act funny—if she cares so deeply for this Jack fellow, then he'll help her. Love is powerful, which is why the 'Love' tea comes in such small doses because few things make people so reckless as an overdose of that stuff.

Every shock Alice receives, every time she discovers something new about Wonderland, Hatter relives it right along with her. He knows what it feels like to be new in Wonderland, and uncertain, and scared, and confused. He knows because he was there once, too, scared and alone and too human in a world where humans were a commodity.

He helps her down from the ladder with his hands on her waist. He's not sure she really needs the help because she's remarkably agile in those heeled boots, but he uses it as an excuse to touch her because, well, why not?

She balks at the ladder and the narrow walking ledge.

"I've got a thing about heights," she tells him, her voice wavering, as she tries to climb backwards up the ladder.

He glances over the edge to the drop straight down and he remembers the first time he saw it and it scared _him_ then and he isn't even afraid of heights. Her face is pure fear but he can tell she wants to press on, despite her terror, so he offers her a hand. His right hand. His 'sledgehammer'. She takes it and lets him lead her on.

As much as he feels a kinship with Alice, she is completely different than he is. Dodo shoots him and she only runs when he tells her to, and then she comes back for him and actually _fights_ for him. She lets her fists and her feet fly and tosses Dodo over her shoulder like he was made out of feathers and she comes to save him. That he isn't hurt is neither here nor there—she has no idea he wears body armour regularly, remembers to put it on the way most people remember to put on shoes or underwear—for all she knew he'd been shot and was bleeding to death but she came back and dragged him into the transport anyway. Hatter would never do that. David might have, but Hatter would not.

And then she hits him—right where the bullet hit, and _dammit_ that hurts because it's left a huge bruise there—when she knows he's not wounded and her pretty little face contorts into anger and it's because she _actually cares_ about him and that shouldn't get to him but it does, it does.

He tries to keep his head cool, keep his mindset like it's been for years—he cares about himself at the expense of everyone else, himself only—and tries, as he has for ages, to sell it to _himself_ so that he'll believe it. He wants to help her because she has the Stone of Wonderland, and that Stone is the most important thing in this world. He wants to help _her_ because by doing that he'll help _himself_ and that's it.

He tries to trick himself into believing it.

And then she calls him selfish and that makes his guts do funny things and he can't figure why. He's been called selfish and worse before and it never bothers him because, well, he is. But Alice, who he wants to help, calls him _selfish_ and he doesn't want to be, not to her.

Alice is as stubborn as a pig and she refuses to even broadly entertain the notion that she could go back home without her boyfriend in tow. She simply won't hear of it. She's seen the dangers of Wonderland up-close and personal, she's seen him _get shot,_ and everyone including Hatter has told her that the Casino is the most dangerous place by far and she _still_ wants to go in and save him. No amount of words or charm will convince her otherwise. He's sure he could beg and she won't relent.

Words are powerless. He can talk and talk forever and she won't believe him and she won't bend to his will no matter what he does so he can't make her do anything—the only other way to _make her_ do something is by force, which he would never do and anyway he doesn't think he could overpower her, not after what she did to Dodo. His words do nothing to her and that scares him because the only women in his past who haven't bent to his charms have died and if Alice dies, too—

Why does this bother him? He's only just met her. She's a means to an end and she shouldn't mean anything to him.

And then he sees the Suits and the creature with the ceramic rabbit for a head—_why??—_raiding his shop and talking to Ratty and Dormy and he knows they're onto him. Something about the rabbit-headed character strikes a chord in his memory but he can't place it because things are going on all at once and there are other more pressing matters for him to deal with. He can't go back to his Tea House, not now. Possibly not ever. He's a marked man and he takes Alice and flees.

His suggestion that he should follow Alice back through the Looking Glass takes her by surprise and it takes _him_ by surprise, too, because his voice didn't consult his head before making it. But what he says is true—he _is_ homeless here, just as lost as he was in his first days, and on the hit-list of everyone on each side of the law.

The idea of running away and starting over again has never occurred to him here—when he abandoned David so long ago, he silently agreed to stay here in this Wonderland forever. Going back into the 'real world' has never been a realistic option and even now it isn't one, but something in him has decided that picking up and leaving Wonderland and everything in it behind and starting life again with Alice is a good idea.

Now that he's said it, he can't very well un-say it and she doesn't object. Suddenly he feels something he hasn't felt in a long time: hopeful. Maybe the world's changed. Maybe things are different. Maybe he _can_ start over again. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Oh, but this little Oyster in her very wet dress is infuriating.

He can't trust that Alice will operate on her own survival instinct. She didn't run when he was shot and she doesn't leave him when he's baiting the Jabberwocky, either. She won't leave his side. She feels some loyalty to him, possibly because he's her only means of survival, so she won't abandon him and that's going to get _her_ killed, he knows.

He doesn't want to see Alice hurt. He tells himself that that's because she has the Stone, but even if she were dead he can simply take the ring and use it as a bargaining chip so that isn't it. But he refuses to acknowledge the possibility that she might mean something to him, and later that night when they're safe in the old crackers White Knight's city, he tells her he's staying in Wonderland. He says it's because Wonderland is his home and he can't leave, and he tells her he wants to use the ring as a bargaining chip not because he wants to get back in with the Resistance but because he knows it'll upset her. He wants her to be upset with him because if she's upset with him then it means he can't go back with her and he'll _have to_ stay here. He doesn't want to think he might be getting attached to her. He can't get attached. She is a means to and end and nothing more.

She _will not_ hear of going back to her world before she saves her boyfriend and he doesn't want to argue about it, not now, not tonight.

"Jack's a lucky guy," he says and Alice doesn't hear him and he doesn't fancy repeating himself.

Jack, whoever he is, _is_ a lucky guy. To have someone this dedicated to him, who loves him this much and would do so much for him, who is all passion and drive—Hatter hopes, bitterly, that Jack Chase knows how lucky he is and appreciates Alice like she should be appreciated.

That night he dreams and he dreams _about her_ and it's the first dream he's had in goodness knows how long that had another person in it. In his dream she throws her arms around him and hugs him and even though it's a dream he feels so happy and wonderful and he never wants to let her go and then she vanishes and his dream-self feels nothing but panic and fear.

When he wakes up in the morning, she's not there and has left the coat he gave her hanging on a ladder. He knows that means she doesn't intend to come back because a lifetime ago he would have done the same thing—given an item back that didn't belong to him when he knew he wouldn't encounter the owner again.

Dread fills his stomach and his chest because he knows where Alice has gone and she's walking into a death-trap and he goes after her because she's more than just a pawn for him. He wouldn't risk his life for a pawn and he wouldn't be so scared for someone he intended to use.

She's no pawn. She's Alice. And he goes after her.

Once upon a time, there was Alice, and once upon a time, Hatter found something besides himself to fight for.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

I _loved_ writing this chapter! So I hope you love reading it. It must be because it gets into the whole Alice/Hatter relationship. Which is awesome. I think seeing another escaped Oyster would stir up a lot of human emotion and memories in Oyster!Hatter. It doesn't hurt that she's cute as a button and wearing a very wet dress.


	11. Chapter 11

Most of this chapter, and most of the other chapters that take place during the series, are internal commentary rather than action. I figured you probably didn't need a recap of the show, since we've (presumably) all seen it already. Maybe it's my little shipper heart, but I love writing this stuff. Plus, I like getting into Hatter's head.

Disclaimer: Everything you recognize is not my property. Small pieces of dialogue—you'll know them when you see them—were taken from the show and I don't own _them,_ either.

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time there was a man called Hatter, who was self-serving and a conman and who played both sides of the law—until 'Just Alice' got to him.

He hasn't planned for Alice to get to him and he hasn't _wanted_ Alice to get to him but she does and because of her he begins to change.

Otherwise he would never have gone after her.

Doctors Dee and Dum—the Tweedle Torturers, as they're colloquially known—are known throughout Wonderland for their love of sadistic psychological and physical torture of their victims. The lucky ones die. People who survive an encounter with the Tweedles often go mad and never speak again; others tell stories so horrifying that they make even the hardest soul cringe. The thought of Alice at their mercy, being tortured inside and out by their sick little games, scares Hatter more than if he himself were in danger.

For all that he's decided Charlie is completely bonkers, he's useful and Alice is right: he's a survivor. He hasn't lived this long without knowing how to _survive,_ just as Hatter has lived in Wonderland, in disguise, for so long because he too knows how to survive. Charlie leads them right to the Truth Room where Alice is being tormented, balanced on a teensy little ledge of wood and scribbling something frantically with just a floating desk between her and a long tumble to certain death.

The way she says his name, in surprise and relief and she's glad he's there, makes him want to jump over the gap between them and hold her. He stands at the door and tells her to jump and he opens his arms so she'll know he's there to catch her and she hesitates for just a second before she climbs onto the desk and swings from the light on the ceiling and into his arms and she's _there_ and she's _solid_ and he knows she's safe. Or safe, at least, from the immediate danger of the Tweedles.

They're forced to fight the Suits on the roof and once again Alice proves to be a formidable fighter, and Hatter watches her out of the corner of his eye with keen interest as she delivers those devastating kicks and quick hits to the Suits. She's all taught muscle under smooth fair skin and she knows how to make a fist fly and if Hatter was completely honest with himself he'd admit that it kind of turned him on, but Hatter isn't even moderately honest with himself so he tries his best not to think about it.

He has to talk her onto the flamingo with him because she's scared, he says he wouldn't let her do it if he didn't think she'd be okay, and she buys it. But he doesn't _know_ they'll be okay and for all he knows this thing will go two feet off the top of the Casino and then a million feet straight down and the Suits will just mop up what's left with a bit of towel. By now he knows Alice, though—it wasn't his convincing that convinced her but rather the knowledge that it's either the flamingo and _possible_ death or the Suits and _certain_ death, and _possible_ is much better than _certain_ in this case.

Alice is much like him.

She holds onto him tightly and he can feel her hands shaking but she says nothing about being scared, and Hatter has to try hard to think about everything else around them and not focus on her arms around him or her warm body on his back or that she's so close he can feel her breath on his neck.

She's angry with him from the moment they jump out of the water. She doesn't trust him even though he risked his neck to get her out of the Casino and save her, she doesn't trust him. He's not used to not being able to charm people and he wants her to trust him but she _will not listen._

"I understand," she says because she thinks he wants the ring for a bargaining chip, even though by now he's begun to acknowledge that that's not why he wants it. "Your people need you."

'Your people' means Wonderlanders, but it takes every ounce of effort he can muster not to tell her, _You need me, _you_ are 'my people'!_ because he _is_ an Oyster, just like her and he wants to help her more than all of Wonderland put together.

Alice's missing boyfriend is no Oyster at all, but none other than Wonderland's Prince, Jack Heart. Even though he's never had much longing for other men, Hatter still recognizes that the man is painfully good-looking—tall and clean-cut and blonde hair and blue eyes and strong features and deep even voice—and he's the _prince_ and he can provide her with so much more than he can, scruffy and two-faced and always so close to danger.

And Alice trusts him, which is what _he_ wants from her. She trusts him because he can give her her father, and the look on her face is so hopeful and almost _happy,_ and her face glows and her eyes sparkle but it isn't for _him_ so he tries to talk her out of her happiness and hopefulness. She refuses. She argues with him and has a comeback for everything he says and then finally she screams, "I don't know!" and there's so much passion in her voice.

She's all passion, all fire, all stubbornness and dead-set determination.

He can talk forever and she won't believe him.

But she believes Jack.

He's madly jealous of Jack Heart until Alice speaks again.

"He's engaged. To a Duchess."

She looks so crushed that he feels the heartbreak himself.

"So he's two-timing you."

"I don't think it's like that."

She's still defending him but he no longer feels jealousy. Only sadness. How dare he. How _dare he_ hurt her, his Alice! He wants to rip into the Prince all at once because he's leading her on and he's using Alice, never mind that Hatter has been leading people on and using them for his own benefit for years. This is different—this is _his Alice_ and her pain hurts him.

'His Alice'? When did he start thinking _that?_

He doesn't know.

She accuses him of using her, too, and his gut plummets because the _one time_ he doesn't want to use someone for selfish benefit, wants to genuinely help, she doesn't believe it.

He offers to arrange a meeting with Caterpillar. He pleads with her and pleading seems to work much better than trying to steer her into the direction he wants and she agrees—reluctantly—to his plan.

Alice is _stubborn._

Alice is _reckless._

Alice's hope and trust are misplaced.

Alice always, always wants to put other people ahead of her own survival—first Jack, and then him, and now her father, and goodness knows who else later—and it's going to get her killed in a big fat hurry.

Alice doesn't care enough for her own safety and is forever getting herself into trouble.

Alice is always getting herself _out_ of trouble, because Alice is strong, and clever, and resourceful.

Alice wants to do everything herself, because she wants to prove that she _can—_to herself as much as to other people.

Alice is resilient and tough.

Alice is beautiful.

Alice has stolen his heart.

He is falling in love.

With Alice.

He finds her alone atop the hill above the Knight's city. She looks thoughtful and her eyes are sad and when she talks her voice is soft and Hatter feels completely tongue-tied but he talks anyway because to Hatter words are air and he has no idea how to live without them. He's never noticed her looking this small and delicate before, like he could touch her and she'll shatter into a million-million pieces of dust.

"I was beginning to think you weren't coming back," she says.

"You still don't trust me?"

She doesn't answer and to Hatter that non-answer is just as good as if she told him yes, she trusts him, because if she didn't still then she would have told him and done so very forcefully.

"You're going to join them, aren't you?"

She's pegged him in a way he's usually able to peg other people—she can peel away all of his walls and disguises and she sees right through him. No one has ever been able to do that before. Is this what it's like to be other people, bared under his scrutiny? To be vulnerable to someone else?

He's made the decision to join the Resistance, for real, but he can't imagine how she might have guessed it. Seeing what the Queen has done, not just to the people who remain in Wonderland but to the ancient Knights who once watched over Wonderland and ruled with a firm but fair hand—and now all that's left of them is this city, just as skeletal now as the dead Red King sitting on his throne, and mad Charlie who has lived all on his own for such a long, long time.

Perhaps what hurts him most is that the Queen has taken Alice's father from her, too—and Alice has been living most of her life not knowing what happened or why he left. When Hatter fell through the Looking Glass long ago, he was all alone in the world and nobody missed him when he left. But surely all Oysters are not like that, and they are like Alice's father and have lives and families and friends that they are taken away from forever and nobody knows what's happened to them. Losing someone to death is no less devastating, but at least in death there are no loose ends; when people simply _vanish_ there is always that _whatif_ and those left behind will always wonder.

Hatter has lived his entire life on _both_ sides of the Looking Glass playing in both courts. He has never devoted himself entirely to one cause—he has always lived with one foot in each garden in order to ensure that he can survive. He doesn't know how to survive any other way.

The time for that is gone. He has always been a double-agent and a conman and he's found he doesn't want that anymore. There is more to life than that and there is more to fight for than that.

The walk down the hill is silent until they enter the forest again and then Alice stops. She's scratching her arm where she's burned and she looks like she's off in her own world and her pace slows.

"What's the matter?"

She turns to him and her eyes are so, so sad and quietly—because if she says it any louder it means it might become reality—she asks, "What'll I do? If I get stuck here?"

The possibility weighs heavy in her mind and he can tell because for the first time she has no walls up and she isn't trying to keep him away because she's frightened.

"Then I'll make sure you're okay," he answers.

_Because I'm just like you,_ his mind says. _Because we're more alike than you could possibly know. Because I care about you and I will do everything in my power to make sure you're safe and unhurt. Because I love you, Alice, I love you I love you I love you._

The words are manufactured and are sitting on his tongue and knocking on his teeth and waiting to come out between his lips but he won't let them go any further because he can't, he can't.

He gets closer and she lets him get closer and his hands are on her arms and she lets him and he breathes against her, "I think your luck is finally changing," because he doesn't want to lie to her or use her and he cares for her and he _isn't_ engaged to Duchess and he cares for her so deeply.

And she tilts her head up to him and they're so close he can feel her breath on his mouth and she's so close and—

Maybe it's inevitable that Jack turns up when he does, sword in hand. Maybe the world is making Hatter pay for a lifetime of using people by ensuring that he can't have the one person he _does_ care fore and _doesn't_ want to use. He puts himself between Alice and the Prince and tells himself that the Prince will have to skewer him like a borogrove before he lets him get to her. And then he picks up a stick and marches over, prepared to fight him off with anything, even his bare hands or a handful of pebbles, because Jack's already hurt his Alice before and Hatter doesn't want Alice to get hurt by him. Not again. Not while he's here.

She puts _herself_ between them and declares that if anyone is going to fight, it'll be her, and Hatter has no doubt she could flatten them both and that fills him with a certain swell of excitement.

When Alice says he's 'just a friend', it cuts him to the bone. That almost-kiss certainly wasn't just friendly and he doesn't want to be 'just a friend' to Alice. He can't be. He is in way too deep to be 'just a friend'.

But Jack is, of course, a Resistance insider, taking the biggest risk of any Resistance fighter in Wonderland by betraying his own mother and living more perilously than anyone else.

And he can bring her to her father. That is Alice's weakness and whether he knows where her father is or not, Jack knows that's her weakness and she's willing to follow him anywhere, do anything he wants, just so she can see him again—and what's worse is that the Prince knows he can manipulate her with it and Hatter can't.

His words are useless, pointless, impotent and there's nothing he can do to stop Alice from buying Jack's story. He can't stop her from believing that Jack can offer her the one thing in the world she wants more than anything else—her father.

It's more than a lifetime ago that Hatter's father left him and his mother and he's thought of it seldom since then, but he remembers—vaguely but insistently—the fear and the worry that _he_ had somehow caused his father to leave. Alice feels that about her own father and she has felt it for years and now Jack is offering her a chance to see him again.

Hatter can't give her that.

It's preposterous that the Prince tells her he cares for her more than anyone else in the world because that isn't possible, because the Prince would have to be ten people in order to care for her more than he does, but he says nothing. He can't do. The Prince can protect her, the Prince can make sure she's all right.

Jack can take her to Caterpillar, who is willing to help.

Jack can get her home safely through the Looking Glass with the father she's been missing for half her life, rather than having to seriously entertain the notion that she might be stuck here forever.

_He_ can't do any of that.

Hatter drops his stick in defeat.

Instead he lies. Lies one last time. To both of them—to Alice and to himself—and he tells her he'll be fine and he tells her she's better off with the Prince and he knows it's just a matter of time before he believes the lie himself.

"Me? Are you kidding? I'll be fine," and "You'll be better off with this guy."

And then he's gone.

Once upon a time, Hatter cared so much for someone that he understood what it meant to let them go. Once upon a time, he let Alice go.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Hatter seemed to get a bit angsty there. He has a 'you-just-kicked-a-kitten' look on his face when Jack says he cares for Alice 'more than anyone else in the world'. Makes me want to kiss him. Except Alice would probably kick my ass.


	12. Chapter 12

Wow. This is the longest chapter in the story. I never meant for it to get this out-of-control but there was a lot of ground to cover so it ended up being longer than the others. (Not nearly as long as I've written in the past, though. Thank your lucky stars for that.) Hope you enjoy!

Disclaimer: Hm, nope. Still don't own it. Try again next week.

o…o

Once upon a time, Hatter stopped lying.

His life is all lies, that's all it's ever been. One lie after another after another, built up haphazardly and flimsily and unsteady but still standing, however precariously—a house of cards. His very _existence_ here is a _lie_ and a _con._

And when Jack Heart takes Alice away he feels his house of cards come down on top of him.

He's done with his lies.

He _doesn't_ trust the Prince and he _doesn't_ want Alice to go with him and he _isn't_ going to hide out in the hills. She's not better off with the Prince and she's not in safe hands and he's not content to let her go with him. He loves Alice and he wants her to be safe and _no one _in Wonderland or on the other side of the Looking Glass can keep her safe the way he can and he follows her.

Charlie comes with him, too, because Charlie wants to protect her, possibly because this is the first time in forever he has something to look after that isn't one of his horses, but Charlie is useless under pressure and when he tells him to grab Alice while he distracts the Suits, he balks and runs off and Hatter, too, is captured.

She screams his name and screams for them to leave him alone, struggles against the men holding her. He can hear the fear in her voice—fear for _him,_ that _he's_ been captured—and his heart breaks.

And then that creature with the rabbit-head—_why a rabbit head,_ of all things?—stands over him.

"Well, well, what a surprise."

And Hatter recognizes immediately what's been following them and the blood drains out of his face.

March. Mad March. He's supposed to be dead! But he doesn't have time to be shocked. He's too busy being terrified.

The thought of Mad March as well as the Tweedles having a go at Alice with their sick games and thirst for torture scares him more than the thought of confronting Mad March himself. He doesn't know exactly when he stopped caring about himself first, but putting Alice before himself feels like the most natural thing in the world now. He has to protect Alice.

And he's failed to do that.

The ride back to the Casino is unbearably long. _Painfully_ long, because he's separated from Alice and because he doesn't know where March is. For all he knows, he's getting a head-start on his torture of Alice right now while they're in the Scarab, and there's nothing Hatter can do to save her. He's tied up hand and foot and blindfolded and he's been given a nice pre-emptive thrashing by the Suits.

He's scared and his head hurts and his heart is racing and he can't come up with a plan because he's never come up with a plan that would involve more than just _him_ surviving.

In the Casino he's handled like an empty crate by the Suits, hauled around carelessly and tossed and dragged, and he's still blindfolded and he can't see Alice and he doesn't know where they're taking her so even if he _does_ manage to escape he isn't going to know where to look for her.

Dee and Dum have an evil little voice and a spine-chilling laugh that makes his scalp prickle every time they do it, which is every time they poke him with that electric prod, which is every few seconds. They dance around on their fat little legs and cackle their horrible cackle and stick him with the prod again and again and again. They're enjoying this. They're not asking him any questions at all, don't want any information out of him—they're just torturing him for the fun of it.

Pain he can endure; all he has to do is grip the arms of his chair and grind his teeth. But Dee and Dum aren't just in it for causing bodily pain—though that's clearly a major perk for them. As they jab him with the electric prod and bash him around with their fists, they taunt him with their words.

"Pretty little Oyster-girl."

"Ever so pretty."

"I think the Hatter might be sweet on the Alice Oyster."

"I think you may be right."

_Jab._ All the muscles in his arm tighten as the prod burns him, burns him. He growls low but doesn't speak. He keeps his face stony. As long as he doesn't have a reaction, the Tweedles will keep trying, and as long as they're still trying to get a reaction from _him_ it means they're _not_ going to torture Alice. He'll stay here and endure their torture forever if it means keeping them away from her.

The prod is passed and the other 'doctor' jabs his other arm and he yowls in pain and they both cackle dementedly.

"The Queen says we can finish up with the girl when we're done with him."

"Should be fun."

"Ever so much fun."

"Make her scream."

"Make her cry."

"Make her call for you to save her—"

_Jab._ Growl.

"—but you can't. She'll be all alone."

They circle him and laugh and backhand him across the back of the head and put their twisted faces right up close into his and he keeps his gaze fixed on the floating green pattern of the Truth Room before him.

One of them jabs the prod into the soft part between his neck and shoulder and the pain goes all the way through his body. Then he takes the prod and turns it around and takes aim at his head like a cricket player and _swings_ and stars explode in his head when it makes contact with his right eye.

They laugh.

They're loving life.

"Or else…" one begins, and a smile comes across his face that's so disturbing and wrong that it almost makes Hatter scream as if he'd just stuck that prod into his gut.

"You have an idea, brother?"

"Oh yes, I do indeed."

"Tell me."

Blood rushes in his head and he grips the chair until his knuckles run white because if he doesn't he's going to shake and he doesn't want them to know they're getting to him.

"We could leave him here."

"And torture the girl?"

"We could, we could!"

"So he has to listen to her screaming and he can't help."

"I like that, brother. I like that a lot. Two for one, two for one!"

"Two for one!"

They dance around his chair and toss the prod back and forth and jab him over and over again quickly on his back and neck and chest and stomach, too fast for his body to prepare itself.

Hatter has always been so good at keeping himself under control, but the sick little Tweedles have found his weakness and the thought of being forced to listen to them torture Alice while he's helpless and hearing her scream his name makes his face twitch ever so slightly and the demented doctors pick it up immediately.

"So that's it, then, isn't it?"

"He cares for the Alice-girl."

"What do we do first to her?"

The second twin rams the electric rod into his chest and leaves it there until it burns, burns, burns through to his flesh and Hatter bellows and snarls and on instinct tries to get away.

They jab him and prod him and talk about all of the sick things they want to do to his Alice and Hatter tries to ignore them but, unbidden, the images invade his mind and those images hurt him more than anything the Tweedle doctors can do to his body. But they're still far too interested in tormenting him right now and they haven't left to act on their promises to hurt Alice so he sits in the chair and lets the blood drip into his collar and endures everything they throw at him, because the longer he stays here the less time they'll have with Alice.

How long is it? Hours, days? He doesn't know. He can't think.

And then comes March. If Mad March still had his head then he knows that he'd be grinning that evil grin and his eyes would be wildly spinning because Mad March's eyes were always spinning, like he was some kind of freakish clockwork toy wound far too tightly. As it is, Hatter stares into that blank ceramic rabbit head and growls.

Even with the threat to kill him, Hatter knows that Mad March was never one for making death swift and he knows he'll make it last as long as he can. That knife won't make short work of him—that much he knows.

But worse is that the Tweedles are gone, and for all he knows they've gone to start their work on Alice and he feels a fire burn in his belly. He won't let them do that. He can't, he won't.

He's heard of people under extreme duress doing amazing things—walking ten miles clutching their own severed arm, fighting whole battles while riddled with bullets, not noticing serious wounds until long after they're inflicted—and all at once he feels he understands why. His strength has been slowly drained during his torture but when March pulls that knife out he feels a sudden surge of energy through his veins and suddenly he turns numb to the burning wounds on his body and the throbbing in his head.

They will not have his Alice.

Not as long as he can still talk and fight and breathe.

When March's knife slices through the bonds on his right wrist he knows he has one shot and he takes it.

The ceramic crackles and crumbles and all the wires and circuits are exposed and Mad March's hybrid-mechanical body malfunctions spectacularly and Hatter coldly leaves him on the floor to seize and die.

He feels nothing—pure mad evil like Mad March deserves no mourning, no respect.

And he has other things on his mind. He has to find Alice.

Finding one girl—one _Oyster—_in the Heart Casino is like finding a needle in a haystack. He has no idea what the Queen has elected to do with her and so he doesn't know if she's in one of the prison cells awaiting torture, or awaiting execution, or if she's in one of the game rooms with the other Oysters having her emotions drained.

There's an enormous commotion all over the place—something, somewhere is sending the Suits inside the Casino into a frenzy—and he's lost in the chaos. The Suits are too busy and too distracted with their orders, whatever they are, to notice him so Hatter doesn't have to be as careful as he thought he'd have to be, but he can't fathom where to start. There's so much to do and so little time in which to do it and such an enormous casino to search and Alice could be absolutely anywhere in Wonderland or even on the other side of the Looking Glass and he feels panic and desperation swell in his chest.

Where's Alice?

_Where is Alice??_

He sneaks into one of the game-rooms with a group of Suits who take a shortcut across it and he ducks under one of the tables to hide and wait and think. He's going to get approximately less than nowhere without thinking about it, without an idea.

There are a few security-Suits in this game room so he stays where he is and hardly dares to breathe while he tries to come up with _something_ but his head is empty, empty and all he feels is panic. He's careful not to touch the floor with his hands—his skin—because if he does for all he knows he could stick to it, or the floor will pick up his emotions, and he'll be ousted and the last thing he needs right now is for his long-secret identity as an escaped Oyster to be discovered.

What to do, what to do?

His heart is thudding in his ears. He's not being any help here, he can't stop the Queen from taking more people through the Looking Glass and he can't save Alice. What is he supposed to do?

And then there she is.

It shouldn't surprise him that Alice has managed to escape whatever the Queen sentenced her to. She is, after all, remarkably clever and strong and she has a roundhouse punch that could kill a Jabberwocky. She bursts into the room, panting and wild-eyed and strangely beautiful and jams the door with one of the metal bollards.

Why hadn't _he_ thought to do that?

She climbs up onto the stage where the dancers in their shiny metal dresses are moving about and she looks just as lost and hopeless as he feels.

Then the Suits guarding the tables point their guns at her and she raises her arms in defeat. Hatter bristles. They can't point their guns at her! They can't threaten his Alice!

He comes out from under the table and sneaks up behind the Suits and whistles to catch them off-guard because that's a tactic that's worked for him for many years now. He only gets to go at one of them before Alice grabs the other.

He picks up their guns because they're going to need something to defend themselves when the Suits become aware that something's happening in this room.

"Hatter! You're okay!"

"Yeah."

And then she takes a good look at him and he must look much worse than he's thought he looks because she has fear written in her eyes and even though he's been tortured for hours he doesn't care because she's there and she's safe and she's alive and nothing else in the world matters.

She flings her arms around him and hugs him and he can feel her heart pounding and she says, "I thought you were dead," and she sounds so relieved. He holds her and he never wants to let her go because she's _there._ She smells like warmth, and the forest they've been sleeping in and travelling in for days, and a tinge of sweat, and something vaguely sweet-spicy, and _Alice,_ and she's warm and her scent is intoxicating.

"Oh, that feels good."

He can't help but say it because it does.

It takes all his willpower to push her away and not have her right there on the floor of the game-room in front of the sedated Oysters and the dealers and the security cameras and everyone.

"We should save that until we're safe."

Because when they're safe he can afford to let his brain turn to mush because of her and do so much more than hug her but he can't think about that, not now.

"I'm sorry I didn't trust you."

He has to ask because he has to know because he wants to hear her say it. "D'you trust me now?"

"Completely."

His heart swells.

Hatter's head is completely empty, he can't think of any real plan and his only instinct now is to _run away,_ but Alice isn't like that and for all that they're alike because they're Oysters and they're both so painfully stubborn, what he likes best about her is that she's also so different than he is. He never would have thought the same way she had and when she reveals her plan to stir up emotions and bring down the whole house of cards around them, he thinks she's a genius.

She uses the Oysters for their benefit.

She's forceful and she shouts and she doesn't stop talking, talking, talking and she urges them to _think,_ the way that voice in his head has urged _him_ to think when he's at his worst. And slowly, slowly they begin to come out of their blank-eyed stupors and remember. She wakes them up and the room begins to sink into confusion and panic and disorder as she scares them awake.

Alice is good with words, too, knows how to stir up emotions in people, but she's never had to use her words in the same ways that Hatter has so it makes them seem that much purer, that much more untainted.

"They don't want you to wake up!" She yells as the doors burst open and the Suits run in and the whole room erupts in gunfire.

They each dive behind tables and fire back but Hatter knows it's only a stall-tactic because they're hopelessly outnumbered and eventually their guns are going to run out of bullets and even her black-belt and his sledgehammer are going to be useless against the Suits and their guns. And as if things aren't bad enough as it is, Carpenter walks in and says he'll deal with it and Hatter can see the fear in Alice's face as she points a gun at him.

Her voice cracks as she yells at him and her face is contorted in pain and sorrow and her hands shake, shake but she keeps the gun up and she doesn't move.

_Carpenter_ is Alice's lost father. Things just get better and better.

She doesn't believe him, but he must remember Alice because he knows how to talk to her and he reminds her of the cat, Dinah, and Alice's hands shake harder like the weight of that gun is too much for her to hold up and her face crumbles and she cries as he hugs her and Hatter stays hidden, because there is no place for him here.

If Hatter lives a thousand more years, he won't forget the look on Alice's face when Carpenter falls from the gunshot in his back. Never had he seen someone go from such relief to such pain all at once and he'll never ever forget that. Never.

And then that big lardy Walrus takes aim at her and Hatter lurches to his feet because he _won't stand_ for that. How dare he—_how dare he!_ Not his Alice. _Nobody_ can do that to his Alice, not as long as he can still breathe—not my Alice, _not my Alice,_ you monster! And he squeezes the trigger again and again and again and feels nothing as the bullets land and the man lands on the floor in a puddle of his own blood.

The Oysters are cut loose and flee as the Casino begins to shake around them and he knows it's just a matter of time before the whole thing collapses but Alice hasn't noticed. The sound of her cries cuts him deep.

"I'm sorry, Daddy, I'm sorry!" She cries shivers but Carpenter hushes her and tells her she's a hero. He's proud of her. And then he's gone and Alice cries so hard it actually hurts him.

"Alice," he picks her up but she tries to stay by the body. There's nothing he can do, nothing either of them can do and he knows that she knows that but he still has to drag her away. "We've got to get out of here, please! I'm sorry!" He has to beg but she must know how dire the situation is because she jumps up and runs with him, still crying.

They run, faster than he imagines he ever could; between the two of them they might have touched the ground five times as they run out of the Casino. Everyone is running, now—the Suits and the Oysters alike and they pour out of the building in droves and by some miracle the whole thing holds until the last Oysters have escaped and then it comes crashing down behind them so violently that it makes a huge gust of air behind them and sends debris in all directions.

Hatter is drained but Alice isn't done yet.

He's never met anyone with as much passion and drive as she has. She's strong and she's smart and she's fiery and she's passionate and much more than she gives herself credit for. She talks the Suits down, talks them away from the Queen and when the woman hands the ring over Alice holds it up and the crowd around them cheers.

She isn't 'Just Alice' anymore. She's just as much Alice of Legend as the first Alice was.

But she was never 'Just Alice' to him, anyway. She's _his_ Alice. He may have to share her memory with all of Wonderland but she means something different to him. She means more to him.

Once upon a time there was a man called Hatter, who didn't want to share the woman he loved with the whole world.

o…o

I really liked writing this chapter, too. Admittedly it's a little thin on the action, and it probably could've used a little more of it. But the whole tone of this story hasn't been about the action, anyway, has it? Anyway, for as long as it turned out to be, I enjoyed writing it. I hope you liked reading it, as well.


	13. Chapter 13

The story isn't over yet, kids! One or two people were worried that the last chapter was the end, but it isn't. Don't fret, there's a smidge more to be read yet. (I'm finally going back to work today, too—thank goodness for snow ploughs and sand trucks!!)

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, a man called Hatter changed.

He runs full tilt into the Looking Glass chamber fully intending on telling Alice once and for all what he feels for her and to beg her to stay here with him because he doesn't know how he's survived all his life without her. But when he walks into the room the first thing he sees is her with her arms around the now-King.

The first thing he thinks is that he's too late, too late. She's picked Jack, not him, even after everything they've been through together, and his chest constricts and his breath hitches in his throat. She means more to him than he does to her and he's been deluding himself. Alice doesn't love him. She loves Jack. She came through the Looking Glass looking for Jack. Jack gave her back her father, however briefly. Of _course_ she loves him.

He watches Alice restart the Looking Glass and he knows she's about to leave—leave Wonderland, leave _him—_and he decides he would rather just go. It's over. _It_ never existed at all, anyway, it's all been in his head. Alice never wanted him to begin with. He would rather leave without saying goodbye and go back to picking up the pieces of his life and starting over yet again because Hatter is always starting over. His life is always changing and he is always adapting. He's done it before, he can do it again.

"Hatter!"

She calls after him and his heart wrenches because it's like she's twisting the knife.

He babbles and the words feel stupid and clumsy and for the first time completely unnatural. It's instinct to him to try and get someone else to believe what he's telling them, but now it's not working and it feels foreign but he keeps going because he doesn't know what else to do. That's what he always does—he talks so he knows his heart is still beating.

"You want me to stay?" She asks him and she doesn't look at all troubled by the idea of staying in Wonderland.

"Hell no!" he says and he fights the urge to hit himself over the head with his boot because that's exactly the opposite of what he wants. He wants her to stay, stay here in Wonderland and stay with him forever because he's not going to survive without her. Without her he's going to go mad.

_Yes, I want you to stay,_ he thinks. _I want you to stay here, stay with me. Please stay with me, Alice, please! I love you and I can't bear to lose you…_

But of course he can't say it that way. She doesn't belong here, she'll be better off back at home with her family. He's Wonderland, and she isn't, and he tells himself they're too different and he pushes her away because if he pushes her away himself then she can't push _him_ away and she can't hurt him.

Hatter and words have always been close friends but words are failing him. The ones coming out of his mouth are different than the ones in his head; in his head all that's playing over and over again are the words _I love you!_ and _Please, please stay with me_ but he can't bring himself to say them. She wants Jack, and she'll be happier if he doesn't burden her with his clumsy confession.

She sounds uncomfortable with words, too, and he imagines she feels awkward standing there with him to her front and Jack Heart to her back.

Then she takes off the coat, and hands it back to him, and it all seems so final like he'll never see her again even with her invitation to visit her world—he knows he'll probably never take her up on the offer because he doesn't know if he could tolerate seeing Alice again knowing that she's chosen Jack over him. Their hug is sterile and cold.

And then she steps up to the Looking Glass.

The technician pushes her and she falls through it and tears his heart right out of his chest as she goes.

He hasn't felt this human or this vulnerable in a long time and the feeling makes him ill.

His Alice is gone.

He stands there for a long time, watching the spot on the platform where she was standing, flesh and blood before him, and where he could have called to her and made her turn around and where he _could have_ run up to her and held her and told her the truth, but where he _didn't_ because he's a coward.

Alice has changed everything and now she's gone and he doesn't know what to do. He's known her for such a short period of time, but even so he has no idea how he lived his life without her and now that she's gone he feels completely lost.

In just a few days, Alice has upended the Queen's house of cards and shaken the foundation of his world and now he's left without her and he feels so completely lost like he hasn't felt since he first fell through the Looking Glass himself.

He searches through the remains of his tea house because even though he knows there isn't going to be any Oyster Tea in Wonderland anymore, the place has still been his home for a very long time, and what with one thing and another he'd like to know if it's still standing. It is, but only just.

The whole place has been ransacked. His grassy carpet has been trampled black, his desk upturned and the drawers and their contents strewn about, his chair on its side; much of his stock of tea has been shattered on the ground and that which hasn't been spilled has been stolen by people who raided the scene after the Suits left. His clothes are strewn about, coats and boots and hats all over the place. Some have also been stolen and others have been trampled on.

He clutches the purple frock-coat in his arms protectively.

It's all he has left of her.

Life under Jack's rule is fairer, easier, but completely different than what Hatter has known. He doesn't know what it's like to be a regular person in Wonderland—he hardly knows what it's like to be one on the other side of the Looking Glass, either. The days wear on and blend into weeks and he keeps himself busy by slowly clearing out his shop and trying to occupy his mind thinking of what to do with the place now, but it's all to stop himself from thinking about _her._

But it's pointless.

Alice is always on his mind.

It's a long time before it occurs to him that he should go after her. There is nothing left in Wonderland for him anymore and there was never a great deal there for him to begin with. But there's something for him on the other side of the Looking Glass and whether she'll ever love him or ever _has_ loved him or not, he can't be without Alice. It's not even a matter of _want to_ or not. He can't. That's it.

One good thing about King Jack is that he's an easily accessible ruler and it's easy for Hatter to arrange to see him in private. He's unguarded and alone in his study in a sea of papers and Hatter doesn't have to jump through hoops or submit to a cavity search to be permitted to see him and when he's in the study there aren't Suits with guns pointed at him, which is much different from the protocol for visiting the old Queen.

Being King has aged him quickly in just a few weeks. There's a whole kingdom to rebuild and the more dedicated tea-junkies aren't happy that their supply has been cut off and there are still people loyal to the Queen of Hearts lurking about, hiding in Wonderland and waiting to strike at the new King and restore his mother to power. It's a lot of work and for the first time he realizes that Jack isn't too terribly much older than he is. He feels pity for him. He has dark circles under his eyes and his face looks drawn and tired but when he sees Hatter he gives him a little nod and a watery smile and he stands up to shake his hand, but Hatter isn't in the mood for pleasantries.

"I want to go back," he tells him straight away. Then he remembers that he _is_ talking to his King whether he likes it or not and the man deserves a little protocol so he hastily adds, "Majesty."

"Go back where?"

"Through the Looking Glass," he says.

"That could be difficult," Jack says. "Visits are tightly restricted."

He's not sure whether he's saying this because it's true or because he doesn't want him to go back through the Looking Glass after Alice. He sees Jack as his rival, certainly, but he's not sure he still sees Jack as a liar and a cheater; both of them spun falsehoods in their lives so they could stay alive. He can't defend his own life of lies and condemn the King for his.

"You're the King," he tells him. "You can tell them to do whatever you want."

"I could do, yes. But I don't want to."

Hatter isn't sure what he means so Jack explains.

"I'm not my mother, Hatter. I don't want to force people to do what I want them to do. I may be the King but I'm also another citizen of Wonderland. Those laws that apply to everyone else must also apply to me."

Curse him for being so honourable! The one time he wants Jack to throw his weight around and break the rules and let him go back through the Looking Glass, he has to act like a good and fair and just ruler.

"I'll go through the right channels, see if I can arrange something—but for now we're just rounding up all of the refugee Oysters and sending them back home."

Hatter isn't the only escaped Oyster in Wonderland, which shouldn't come as a surprise to him but it kind of does. The Resistance hid any that escaped, knowing that fewer Oysters in the Heart's possession meant less Oyster Tea that could be produced and used to keep everyone else under control, and those Oysters are quietly being rounded up and sent back to where they came from after spending often years in hiding.

"Just the Oysters?" Hatter asks.

"Just the Oysters," he answers.

His mind reels. Jack won't budge on this and still part of it feels like the King knows something he doesn't know, and is trying to keep him from finding out what it is.

Only Oysters. He has one last card to play and it's the one he's never wanted to use—the one it's never occurred to him to reveal. Ever. At all. Under any circumstance.

"If you're sending the Oysters through the Looking Glass then you'll have to send me, too," he says. And that's it. His secret is out, in front of the King, and there's nothing he can do now and he'll let the chips fall where they may.

And Jack looks at him and his eyes go wide but nothing else on his face changes.

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"How long?"

"A long time."

Jack sat down on the edge of his desk and crossed his arms and stared at him sternly and it felt like he was looking right through him with those piercing blue eyes and Hatter feels like he has to explain so he does. He spills the truth—all of it—about how he's hidden in Wonderland for all these years and managed to keep his identity a secret and the King just stands there and listens with a stony expression on his face. It's like nothing surprises him.

"I hope you're not lying to your King in an attempt to get me to let you through the Looking Glass."

"I swear to you, your Majesty, I'm not."

"Are you marked?"

Nod.

"Where?"

His face burns as he touches his thigh where the Scarab marked him long ago and Jack's eyebrows climb his forehead.

"I _do_ hope you're not lying."

"I'd show you but I'm not sure what the protocol is for showing my butt to the King."

Jack laughs but Hatter doesn't feel like laughing. This is serious.

"What year was it when you left?"

He has to think about that because he hasn't thought about it in a very long time. He isn't sure of the exact year and he can't reliably remember the year he was born, either, so he has to guess. "I think it was 1925," he says, for no other reason than because it might be the general time-period and because it's a nice round number.

He nods slowly.

"What year is it out there now?"

"It's 2009."

He thinks about that for a moment. 84 years have passed since he came to Wonderland. That's several lifetimes. An unfathomably long time. He absently wonders how much the world has changed.

"I suppose it's a good thing you didn't jump through the Glass after her," he says absently, and Hatter bristles before he continues. "The Looking Glass sends people back to the approximate time and place when they left. Oysters who've been here for months, for years, will go right back to where they came from and they're free to think it's all a dream."

"So what can I do? What will you _let me_ do?"

"Let you?"

"You care for her."

"I do."

"She picked you."

Silence.

"She didn't, though."

Now it's Hatter's turn to be confused and he stands there trying to process the information and he's sure he's probably got an unnervingly blank look on his face like some kind of malfunctioning robot and it dawns on him that he completely misinterpreted what he saw.

Jack reaches into his pocket and produces the little brown case where the Stone of Wonderland still sits. He looks at it absently and turns it in his fingers and then looks back at Hatter.

"I offered this to her."

"I know."

He shakes his head. "No, I mean again. Before she left. I wanted her to stay here, with me, as my queen." He looks up and his smile is bittersweet and he's oozing jealousy. "She said no. She said she'd changed and she wanted something else."

Alice turned him down? Alice turned down _the King?_ She turned down a throne of her own and a life of comfort? She turned down Jack?

"I think you're the something else."

What has he done? He's let her get away. She's back in her world and by now she thinks he doesn't care for her when nothing could be further from the truth, and his head is spinning.

"She wanted you, not me."

The King's sadness is obvious in his voice when he says it, but he doesn't let it show in anything he does. He stays fair and objective.

Jack Heart, he thinks, will make a good king.

With Carpenter gone and many of the Queen's scientists either dead or jailed or in hiding, the process of reprogramming the Looking Glass proves to be difficult. The Queen herself isn't talking and no one still loyal to her is willing to help; so Hatter has to wait for them to figure it out and even then there are no guarantees that it'll work. He is still an Oyster and the Looking Glass will recognize him as such and try to put him back where he came from.

The scientists who remain aren't always willing to send the Oysters who hid in Wonderland back to where they came from—they want to study them, study the effects of Wonderland on people who weren't born to it, see what happened to them. Many of the refugee Oysters—those who have lived in hiding in this place for sometimes a century or more—don't want to go back through the Looking Glass and elect to stay where they've made their homes for so long. The world outside has changed, and Wonderland is their home now.

The scientists want to study Hatter, too, because he's lived in Wonderland for a very long time and they want to do all kinds of experiments on him and the other Oysters, but Jack won't let them do it. They've been through enough already, he tells the men in their white coats, and if they don't want to participate then they don't have to.

To keep him busy—and perhaps to keep his mind occupied and maybe to keep his hopes up—Jack gives him a crash course in the world circa 2009 so he's better able to blend in with the people once he goes through. He says he'll give Hatter some money to get started and let him use the apartment he was renting in the city where Alice lives.

"Why are you helping me so much?" He asks, because a lifetime of using people has made Hatter extremely suspicious of anyone trying too hard to be nice to _him._

"Because I care for Alice," he answers simply. "I want her to be happy—even if it isn't with me."

"What'll happen when I go back through the Looking Glass? It's been 84 years since I was there. Will I be over a hundred if I go back to Alice's time?"

"I don't know."

It unnerves him but he knows there's nothing he can do about it. All he can do is sit, and wait, and hope.

Once upon a time, a man called Hatter discovered what it felt like to have his own fate entirely out of his hands.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

Like other chapters I've written for this story (and others), I liked this one a lot better long after I wrote it. The next chapter is the last one, save for a (very!) short epilogue—all good things must come to an end, I suppose.


	14. Chapter 14

Final chapters are always a bit bittersweet for me. I _finished_ a story, a fairly long one, and it was a good story! And now I can get on with working on and posting new stories! But at the same time, it's like my baby just grew up and left home. (Even though I have absolutely no maternal instinct in me at all.)

0…0…0…0…0

o…o

Once upon a time, Hatter wasn't Hatter anymore.

He's not a Wonderlander and he's not sure he ever really was, not fully or completely; neither is he an Oyster, because he's been away from that world several times longer than he lived _in_ it. He isn't the Hatter of Wonderland anymore, or the Hatter who once lived in England and was arrested for killing a policeman. He isn't David, either, because David died a long time ago as far as he's concerned. He's not sure what he is anymore and being unsure is something alien to him.

He is always changing, always adapting, because that's what he does and what he's always done. He adapts and changes and talks to survive but now he doesn't want to just _survive_ anymore. It's not enough.

In such a short time he's changed so much and it's all because of Alice. Alice Hamilton, the Alice of Recent Legend. The hero of Wonderland.

His Alice.

The day finally comes when he can go through the looking glass, to Alice, and he feels surprisingly uneasy about leaving. Despite everything, Wonderland has been his home for decades and it represents a huge chunk of his life and he feels sad about leaving it even though he's ready to start again wherever it is Alice lives. But his life in Wonderland has been almost entirely lies and he's not the man who lies to survive anymore. He doesn't have to be. He doesn't want to be.

Charlie is there when he leaves and so is Jack but otherwise the Looking Glass chamber is empty but for the bored-looking technicians in lab-coats operating the thing. Charlie warns him that he'd better take damn good care of JustAlice of Legend or else he'll go there himself and thrash him around, and Hatter doesn't have the heart to remind the old knight that Alice can take care of herself because he cares so much for her, too, but in an entirely different way.

Jack says nothing. They share a look and the King nods to him as a way of giving his final approval, which wouldn't have mattered to him before but that he finds kind of comforting now.

The plummet through the Looking Glass is just as frightening now as it was the first time, and the landing is just as hard. He lands on—_impacts,_ really—cold, hard, wet ground and it sends a jolt through his whole body. He aches as he stands up, but he checks himself over with his hands—on his face, his chest, his limbs—and finds that everything is where it should be. He looks at his reflection in an uninstalled window leaning on the wall and he neither looks nor _feels_ like he's over a hundred years old, which he takes as a sign that everything is all right for the time being.

All they could do with the Looking Glass is to send him to _approximately_ the time and place where Alice landed, which means she could have been there and gone already for hours. The place is dark and spooky and he can't see where he's going so he shuffles along carefully with his hands out in front of him. He half-expects Alice to jump self-defensively out from behind one of the corners and kick him in the face, thinking he's an attacker, but he doesn't find her.

And then he trips over something and catches himself on a section of girder and rights himself. There's something small and blue at his feet.

Alice.

Her landing was much harder than his was because she's out like a light and as limp as a wet towel and cold, too—she must have been here for a while—but she's still breathing evenly and easily so he doesn't let himself panic, not just yet. He drops to his knees and takes her into his arms but he doesn't hug her because it would feel weirdly violating to hug an unconscious woman.

"Alice, wake up, please," he whispers, but she doesn't respond. She doesn't respond to anything, not shaking or begging or anything, so he picks her up and makes his way towards a light he sees that leads him to the street.

Upon noticing that he has an unconscious woman in his arms, people run over and immediately start asking questions and offering to help. Hatter talks—and talks _quickly—_and tells them he found her after she ran into the building and when someone asks if he's a construction worker he says he is because it's as good a cover as any.

He follows her to the hospital but can't go any further than that so instead he paces nervously in the lobby. He can only pace so long before the staff tell him he has to go home, but he can't. He has to know she's okay.

He paces and paces for hours. He'll wait here forever until she comes out—otherwise she'll be all alone.

A woman runs frantically into the emergency room. She has tears on her face and she looks terrified.

"I'm looking for my daughter," she tells the previously-apathetic lady sitting at the desk. She reaches into her pocket and shoves an identification card into the receptionist's face. "Alice. Alice Hamilton. I'm her mother, Carol. Please."

"Yes, ma'am," the woman at the desk says, casting only a sideways glance at the card before summoning an orderly to take her where Alice no doubt is. "Follow him."

Hatter watches with wide eyes and keen interest. Maybe…

"Sir, you need to leave before we call the police," the receptionist, cold again, tells him. "I can't let you see Miss Hamilton. Don't bother that poor woman."

"But—"

"You know my daughter?" The woman, Carol, looks at him so hopefully it actually hurts. "Is she all right? What happened, do you know?" She turns to the receptionist. "Who is he?"

"He brought her here, ma'am, but—"

But Carol is ignoring her and she comes over to him and Hatter tells her he's a construction worker and saw her run into the building and went in after her and she shocks him when she throws her arms around him and hugs him so tight he nearly bursts a blood vessel in his eye. She thanks him over and over again and cries messily into his shoulder, getting her makeup smeared all over his shirt and jacket.

He knows they won't let him see Alice because only family are allowed so he asks if it's all right for him to come and see her when she's back on her feet again and Carol agrees right away and scribbles their address and telephone number down on the back of an informational pamphlet about venereal disease, which would have been funny in any other circumstance but it isn't right now.

It's only then that he feels at all comfortable leaving because he knows Alice won't be alone now. The last thing he wants is for her to wake up all alone in the sterile hospital and think she's been forgotten or abandoned or worse.

There's nothing for Hatter to do now but wait.

He finds Jack's apartment and lets himself in, intending to kill as much time as possible between now and whenever he can see Alice again. Jack's apartment is as bare-bones and sterile as the hospital waiting-room where he's been pacing for hours and hours. It looks like a temporary base, not a home, with only the barest of essentials: a table with a single chair in the kitchen and a mattress on the floor in the bedroom. There were newspapers piled on the floor and there's tea, too, because no Wonderlander who ever lived could survive without the stuff, but that's it. He wonders what Alice thought of it if she ever came here and how Jack explained the emptiness of his supposed 'home'.

Then he thinks about Alice coming here to see Jack and he fumes silently in retroactive jealousy. Alice with Jack makes his stomach turn, especially knowing how much he hurt her by lying to her.

But he can't think on that now because if he does he'll go crackers. Instead he concentrates on something else. He leaves the apartment almost immediately and walks around and around the city, along the evenly-laid-out gridlike streets that have far more structure than anything in Wonderland ever did. Old reflexes die hard—if he is going to be in a new place, he wants to know everything about it, and it will keep his mind off of Alice.

It isn't until much later that he thinks to check. He goes into the bathroom of the apartment that used to be Jack's and stands on the edge of the bathtub with his back to the mirror and drops his trousers. He sees nothing. His Oyster brand is gone. He touches the spot where the skin is bare for the first time in nearly a hundred years and he feels almost… mournful. He feels naked without it.

He has no distinct identifying features anymore, nothing to single him out.

He isn't a Wonderlander and he isn't an Oyster and he isn't entirely human, at least he doesn't think, because he isn't sure how he _can_ be after so much time.

So what is he?

He waits three days and manages to collect a few things to make the apartment look less like a prison—some clothes and another chair and sofa and a green carpet that reminds him a little like his grass carpet for the bare wood floor—before he calls the number that Alice's mother gave him and asks, shyly, if it would be all right if he came to see her in the next few days. Carol sounds pleased to hear from him so he takes that as a good sign. Alice is coming home this afternoon, she says, and he can stop by then. And then she apologizes and says she was out of sorts in the emergency room, and then she asks his name.

"Hatter," he says out of reflex, and then he amends himself. "David Hatter."

He's in a new place now, and he can start over, and he can pick any name and identity he wants, and he's had plenty of experiences in the past coming up with pseudonyms on his feet, but for some reason he picks the name he hasn't used since he was a child.

He makes his way to the Hamilton's apartment and hesitates at the door for a long time. It's then that he starts to feel panicked and insecure and scared—what if Alice doesn't remember him? Oysters sent back through the Glass are free to think anything they want of their time in Wonderland and many believe them it to be hallucinations or dreams. What if she thinks she dreamed him? What if seeing him makes her faint? What if she hates him?

He is so caught up in 'what-if's he doesn't notice the door open.

Carol greets him, looking much better than she did when she ran into the hospital and she smiles warmly at him and her smile is so much like Alice's. When she calls back into the apartment for Alice he holds his breath and prays and waits.

She walks slowly out of the hall with her head down, looking sad and resigned and he wants to run over and scoop her up and hold her but he stays rooted to his spot, dead still except for the wild thudding of his heart and turning the brim of his hat over and over and over in his hands. And then she looks up at him with those big blue eyes and her face lights up and she says his name.

"Hatter!"

She runs—charges—at him and throws her arms around him and all at once he starts to breathe again as he holds her tight, tight and the room around them dissolves and there's nothing, just them. He closes his eyes. She's _Alice,_ just sweet and warm. She's there and she's solid in his arms and _he's_ solid, too, and they're both real and alive and flesh and blood.

Finally, finally.

"You have no idea how glad I am to see you," she says, but oh yes he does know because he's missed her so much, so fiercely.

And then he kisses her and no one interrupts them and nothing else matters.

"I missed you."

He's the sum of his own experiences, he decides; an amalgam of sorts. He is David who lived in Yorkshire and the charming conman called the 'Hat-Man' and Wonderland's Hatter and an Oyster and a Wonderlander and this new David Hatter all at the same time.

He will never stop changing, never stop adapting, because he's learned that those who stagnate are sure to die. So long as he can still change, he knows his heart is still beating.

He's still here.

He's still alive.

Once upon a time there was a man, called David.

o…o

0…0…0…0…0

I hate getting to final chapters sometimes. Thanks so much to everyone who read this story and gave it a chance, and for putting up with me forgetting to update sometimes. Thanks to those of you who offered feedback here and on Livejournal, and those who didn't and just enjoyed the read. It means a lot.

I have other stories for this fandom in the works, but this one is truly unique for me. I hardly ever write anything so thoroughly serious and dramatic and downright angsty as this one ended up being. I do comedy, really, I swear—my goal is not to make the reader cry. My goal is to make them snort milk out of their noses. Really.

When I get other stories up, I hope you'll take a look at them. Thank you all again for reading.

Until next time.


	15. Epilogue

o…o

Once upon a time, there lived a man who called himself David Hatter, who loved a woman named Alice Hamilton.

He is a long, long way from Yorkshire and the Great War and Wonderland and tea shops. He finds himself once again in a different time, a different place, but he's well used to change and to adapting because he's done it all his life. There is no Resistance, no Queen, no underworld that he sits precariously on the edge of; his daily bread is neither rationed nor stolen. There are no Suits and he doesn't have to lie to survive.

Once upon a time, a boy named David grew and changed and talked and talked to survive and he became a man named Hatter, who talked and talked still because he knew he could survive that way. Because as long as he's still talking, he knows his heart is still beating and he can keep moving.

He falls hopelessly in love with a woman he can't charm with words and doesn't need his protection and doesn't _need_ him for anything but who likes him anyway and stays with him because she wants to. Words are still important to him, even though his life no longer depends on them.

'Happily ever after' is always a concept that's relegated to the storybooks. It isn't real and he's never imagined it would be. He's not sure that they'll live 'happily ever after', because happiness is all relative. They still argue and fight because truly happiness would be no happiness at all for either of them if they can't have a good row every now and then.

Once upon a time, there lived a man named David Hatter, who figured out that he could stop talking and his heart would still beat. He could survive, but more than that he could thrive because simply surviving wasn't enough anymore.

Once upon a time, David Hatter…

…_lived. _


End file.
